A failure in Cloudflare’s Workers KV service triggered a wave of global outages on Friday morning (NZT), knocking services like Snapchat, Spotify, and The New Zealand Herald offline. The disruption stretched across continents, affecting users worldwide.
Key Platforms Go Dark Amid Internet Meltdown
The disruption spread quickly, affecting not just entertainment and social media, but also news websites and cloud-based platforms. U.S. tech media referred to the incident as an “internet meltdown”, with the most significant impact recorded in the Midwest.
The scope of the problem revealed how deeply integrated Cloudflare’s infrastructure has become in the fabric of internet delivery worldwide. The company’s services help manage traffic for apps and websites that collectively represent nearly 20% of global internet activity.
Cloudflare Acknowledges and Responds to the Outage
Cloudflare was quick to acknowledge the incident. At 7:12 a.m. NZT, the company released an initial update, signalling early signs of recovery but warning of continued instability.
“We are starting to see services recover. We still expect to see intermittent errors across the impacted services as systems handle retried and caches are filled.”
Shortly after, the company provided a more detailed explanation, attributing the disruption to a failure in a key third-party service that supports Cloudflare’s internal systems.
“Cloudflare’s critical Workers KV service which provides access to 200 Cloudflare data centres went offline due to an outage of a 3rd party service that is a key dependency. As a result, certain Cloudflare products that rely on the KV service to store and disseminate information are unavailable.”
Google Cloud and AWS Reveal Infrastructure Strains
The outage has been attributed to failures within Google Cloud, which underpins services for many internet-based platforms. According to The Verge, a breakdown in its Identity and Access Management systems impacted multiple offerings.
A Google Cloud service update confirmed:
“Multiple GCP (Google Cloud Platform) products are experiencing impact due to Identity and Access Management Service Issue.”
Amazon Web Services (AWS), a competitor of Google Cloud, also reported unrelated technical problems on the same morning, compounding the instability across the web.
Recovery Efforts Intensify Across Affected Services
Cloudflare has assured users that restoring full functionality remains their top priority as services gradually return online.
“Cloudflare engineers are working to restore services immediately. We are aware of the deep impact this outage has caused and are working with all hands on deck to restore all services as quickly as possible.”
The digital fallout from Friday’s outage stretched across services and platforms, driven by a breakdown at a central provider. The effects were immediate and wide-ranging with companies like Google Cloud, Cloudflare, and AWS handling vast volumes of internet traffic.
The incident raises important questions about redundancy, transparency, and the resilience of global internet infrastructure.