Internet security firm Cloudflare (NET.US) announced it has resolved an issue that caused outages for multiple banks, Shopify (SHOP.US), Zoom (ZM.US), LinkedIn, and other websites on Friday. The company stated on its status page, "A fix has been implemented, and we are monitoring the results." Earlier that day, Cloudflare's dashboard and related APIs experienced disruptions.

Shares of Cloudflare fell as much as 6% in pre-market trading but later pared losses to over 2%. The company's software is used by hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide, acting as a buffer between corporate websites and end users while protecting against traffic overload attacks. Due to its widespread adoption, many high-profile websites become inaccessible or unreliable when Cloudflare encounters issues.

This incident follows a previous outage on November 19, when Cloudflare confirmed a system crash caused by an abnormal configuration file, disrupting access to major platforms like X, ChatGPT, Spotify, and Canva. Ironically, even Cloudflare’s own status page was temporarily unavailable. The latest disruption comes less than a month after Amazon AWS's "US-EAST-1" region failure, reigniting discussions about the risks of centralized infrastructure reliance.

Cloudflare has faced multiple large-scale outages in the past. In July 2019, a software bug drained the company’s computing resources, leaving thousands of websites offline for up to 30 minutes. Affected platforms included Medium, Discord, Shopify, SoundCloud, Coinbase, and Dropbox. Another outage in June 2022 impacted 19 data centers handling most of Cloudflare’s global traffic, paralyzing major websites and services for about 90 minutes. The company has since pledged to review configuration management and enhance redundancy to prevent future incidents.