Cloudflare outage knocks Bet365 and dozens of major sites offline as company works to restore service
Users found they could not reach bet365 and a string of other major platforms on Friday after Cloudflare acknowledged its network was experiencing issues that produced errors and timeouts. The interruption is significant because Cloudflare’s infrastructure underpins thousands of websites and a failure can cascade into widespread service disruptions.
Development details
Cloudflare posted notices that it was investigating problems with its services and that users might encounter errors or timeouts when trying to reach the company’s network. The company issued an update at 2: 45pm Eastern Time saying it was continuing work to restore service for impacted customers. Later in the day, Cloudflare acknowledged unusually high numbers of 403 error messages being returned to visitors, indicating pages were being blocked instead of loading.
Outage monitoring showed a peak of fewer than 500 reports on DownDetector for this incident, a far smaller spike than the roughly 11, 000 reports that accompanied a major outage in November. The disruption affected the public 1. 1. 1. 1 landing page and knocked dozens of sites and apps offline or into error states.
Cloudflare also noted earlier that it had been performing scheduled maintenance at a Portland data center, though it was unclear if that work contributed to the outage. The company operates a vast network spanning more than 330 cities in over 120 countries and connecting to over 13, 000 internet networks; that reach helps explain why a fault can ripple across multiple services.
Context and escalation
The incident unfolded on Friday afternoon, with outage reports peaking at about 2pm Eastern Time before beginning to fall. While this event produced visible disruption to a range of services, it did not match the scale of the November outage that left thousands of internet users unable to access major platforms.
In recent months the company has faced other interruptions: a major outage in November that produced a much larger surge of complaint reports, followed by a second, short-lived outage in early December. Messages about those past incidents have been posted on the company’s help channels, and the firm indicated it would update its system status page to clarify the scope of impact for the current disruption.
What makes this notable is the frequency of high-profile interruptions in a short span of time for an infrastructure provider whose services are embedded across commerce, communications and entertainment platforms.
Immediate impact
The outage left users unable to access a range of consumer and enterprise services. Consumers reported trouble reaching UberEats and bet365, while other affected sites included ride and enterprise platforms as well as email and workplace tools. Some users also noted issues with gaming services that rely on the provider’s network.
Technical symptoms observed during the outage ranged from timeouts to 403 error screens, and visitors to the 1. 1. 1. 1 landing page encountered errors rather than the usual response. The immediate consequence was interrupted access to commerce and communication tools for users attempting to place orders, access accounts or use cloud-connected applications.
Forward outlook
Cloudflare said it was continuing to work on restoring service to impacted customers and will update its status page as the investigation proceeds. The company’s next confirmed step is to provide further clarifying updates on that page; engineers remained engaged in recovery efforts following the afternoon’s notices.
In the short term, monitoring activity on outage tracking services returned toward baseline after the afternoon peak, and the firm’s communications indicated restoration work was under way. The broader implication is that incidents at major web infrastructure providers can rapidly affect large numbers of downstream services, making status updates from the provider a primary indicator of when normal access will resume.
