Global internet disruptions as Cloudfare 'gets hit by bug'

Many internet services in various countries suffered disruptions on Tuesday, November 18, with major web infrastructure company Cloudflare saying that a bug led to broad problems on its network.

Cloudflare, one of the largest internet hosting services, Tuesday morning, that it had begun investigating the issue.

"I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader internet when a problem in Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us," said Dane Knecht, Cloudfare's Chief Technology Officer.

The root cause was a bug in Cloudflare's service for combating bots, he said.

During the outages, Kigali Daily News  website was among those that were affected.

Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Kentik, a company that monitors internet networks, said he saw no evidence that the outage was a result of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, where a hacker slows or stops a website from loading by flooding it with traffic.

Such an attack would be surprising against Cloudflare, he said, as it's a leading DDoS prevention service.