New internet disruptions on many sites

Friday morning was marked by major internet problems when an error at the internet giant Cloudflare knocked out a large number of websites, both in Sweden and abroad. Several sites and societal actors such as airports were affected both in the Nordic countries and internationally.

Among the first signs of the disruptions was that the government’s website suddenly stopped working. Visitors were met with the error message ‘500 Internal Server Error’, the same message that quickly began to appear on a long list of Swedish sites.

Companies such as Rusta, Hemnet, Ikea, SAS, Norwegian, and Swedavia were among those that could not be reached. Even Samnytt experienced temporary technical problems during the morning.

Landvetter airport reported problems, and similar disruptions were seen on several Norwegian news sites. British Sky News reported that all air traffic was halted at Edinburgh airport after the air traffic control system experienced technical problems.

The American internet and cybersecurity giant Cloudflare quickly became the main focus of the technical problems, and it is the second time in a short period that the problems have occurred on a large scale. According to the company, the disruptions were due to issues in their software, which caused significant interruptions after an update.

The company is a key player :censored:6:cdd6bbaa89:ly and states that around 20 percent of the world’s websites are protected by their system. The extensive usage meant that the outage quickly had a significant impact.

The fact that such a large part of the world’s websites are affected when a single actor experiences disruptions raises questions about the internet’s robustness.

– This does not mean that Cloudflare is bad, I cannot mention anyone better. But it is a problem that we have placed a large part of the world’s websites in the hands of a single actor in this way. We need more competitors because when Cloudflare is affected, the consequences are significant, says security expert Karl Emil Nikka to GP.

Despite many services now functioning again, questions remain about why the problems recur and how the vulnerability should be handled in the future.