Bank of America stated that the service outage experienced by cybersecurity firm Cloudflare (NET.US) on Tuesday, which disrupted multiple popular apps and websites, may pose "some reputational risk" but is unlikely to cause long-term issues. On November 18, Cloudflare's global services experienced an outage, leaving numerous users unable to access major internet platforms, including social media platform X and ChatGPT. Spokesperson Jackie Dutton explained in a statement that the disruption stemmed from an automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic, with no evidence of a cyberattack or malicious activity.
Analyst Tomer Zilberman noted in a client report, "Following last month's outages at Amazon (AMZN.US) AWS and Microsoft (MSFT.US) Azure, Cloudflare's incident further highlights the inherent dependency risks associated with large infrastructure providers. While we await further details from the company, we believe the long-term impact will be limited."
Zilberman maintains a "Buy" rating on Cloudflare with a $255 price target. He emphasized that although Cloudflare handles roughly 20% of global internet traffic, any potential credit compensations or discounts would have a "minimal" financial impact. "Cloudflare's products continue to retain customer loyalty, and switching to alternative CDN providers remains costly," he added. "However, service credits and discounts may create short-term headwinds as the company addresses concerns over reputation and reliability. Still, we expect limited revenue impact and maintain our Q4 2025 and Q1 2026 revenue growth forecasts of 31% and 29% YoY, respectively—both above the consensus estimate of 28%."