November 10, 2023 at 10:32AM
Cloudflare’s website experienced a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack by Anonymous Sudan. The attack only affected the www.cloudflare.com website and did not impact other services. Cloudflare confirmed that the outage was caused by a DDoS attack but did not attribute it to a specific threat actor. Anonymous Sudan has also claimed responsibility for other attacks on OpenAI, Microsoft, and more, although some believe it may be a false flag linked to Russia. Cloudflare has since rolled out a fix for the outage. This is not the first time Cloudflare has faced such issues, as previous outages were caused by power outages and misconfigurations.
Key Takeaways from the Meeting Notes:
1. Cloudflare’s website experienced intermittent connectivity issues due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The attack only affected the website and did not impact other Cloudflare services or products. No customers were affected by the incident.
2. Anonymous Sudan (aka Storm-1359) claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack on Cloudflare’s website, as well as other attacks on OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot, Microsoft’s Outlook.com, OneDrive, and Azure Portal. Some analysts suspect the group may be a false flag operation linked to Russia.
3. Cloudflare has rolled out a fix for the ongoing website outage, which was causing “We’re sorry” Google errors to be displayed on their website. The company is investigating the issue and assures that all Cloudflare services are unaffected.
4. This recent outage is not the first for Cloudflare. Last week, a power outage affected their core data center in North America, causing the dashboard and APIs to go down. Additionally, a misconfiguration in the deployment tool caused another outage on October 30, impacting multiple Cloudflare products.
5. Cloudflare has published post-mortem reports following the outages, providing explanations for the incidents and detailing the steps taken to resolve them.