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Less than a week after Cloudflare suffered a days-long outage, DDoS operators claim a strike against the company’s website.
Cloudflare is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week for a content delivery and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection company.
Overnight, its website, www.cloudflare.com, appeared to be down, showing only a stock Google apology.
“We’re sorry ... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now,” the notice read. Not long after, Cloudflare added a report to its status page.
“www.cloudflare.com is experiencing issues,” according to a report from Bleeping Computer. “The Cloudflare Dashboard is accessible through dash.cloudflare.com and APIs and all Cloudflare services are unaffected.”
The site is up now, and nothing critical seems to have been affected by the outage, but now, two DDoS groups are claiming to have been behind the incident.
“Cloudflare is strongly down by skynet / Godzilla-Botnet / AnonymousSudan,” said an Anonymous Sudan spokesperson on the group’s Telegram channel.
“Companies using Cloudflare, they can’t even protect their main site, you think they can protect you?”
It could be entirely possible that the two groups – Anonymous Sudan is a known hacktivist group, while Skynet operates a DDoS-for-hire service – are merely taking advantage of a known outage. However, both groups also claimed to be behind a ChatGPT outage earlier in the week, which OpenAI eventually did admit was the result of a DDoS attack.
We have reached out to Cloudflare for comment.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.