Cloudflare outage hits major web services including X, LinkedIn and Zoom – business live
Technical problems at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare today have taken a host of websites offline this morning,Cloudflare said shortly after 9am UK time that it “is investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs [application programming interfaces – used when apps exchange data with each other],Cloudflare has also reported it has implemented a potential fix to the issue and is monitoring the results,But the outage has affected a number of websites and platforms, with reports of problems accessing LinkedIn, X, Canva – and even the DownDetector site used to monitor online service issues,Last month, an outage at Cloudflare made many websites inaccessible for about three hours.
New economic data from the US has bolstered hopes of cuts to interest rates as soon as next week,The core personal consumption expenditures price index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation mesure, rose by 2,8% per year in September, 0,1 percentage point lower than expected,New official data alsos shows Americans reined in their purchases in September; spending rose 0.
3% month-on-month, but was flat after accounting for inflation,Elsewhere in the tech world, Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, has been fined €120m for breaching EU digital laws, triggering clash between the EU and Donald Trump’s administration,X was fined for breaching EU online content rules, including through the deceptive design of its blue checkmark for verified accounts, the lack of transparency of its advertising repository and its failure to provide researchers access to public data,President Donald Trump’s envoy to the European Union accused the bloc of unfairly targeting American tech giantsAndrew Puzder, the US ambassador to the EU, told Bloomberg TV:“The only substantial meaningful fines that have been imposed so far have been against American companies,”Vice-president JD Vance also objected.
Before the fine was announced, he posted on X:Rumors swirling that the EU commission will fine X hundreds of millions of dollars for not engaging in censorship.The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage.Rumors swirling that the EU commission will fine X hundreds of millions of dollars for not engaging in censorship.The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage.In the City, the pound is trading near the six-week high reached yesterday.
A stronger-than-expected survey of UK purchasing managers on Wednesday, and relief that the budget has finally been delivered, have helped the pound.It’s up a third of a cent today at $1.3350.Matthew Ryan, head of market strategy at global financial services firm Ebury, explains:The upward revision to the November PMI figures has raised hopes that Britain’s economy is not slowing by quite the extent that market participants had feared, albeit with the caveat that we’re still looking at relatively muted levels of growth, way below where policymakers would hope that we’d be.“Yet, with the economy continuing to trundle along, and with the uncertainty surrounding the budget now largely in the rear view mirror, sterling has found some welcome breathing room.
Focus will quickly shift to the December meeting of the Bank of England, with another 25 basis point cut already almost entirely baked in by markets.Focus surrounding the decision will instead be on where the bank sees rates going in 2026.”Cloudflare’s outage shows the need for multi-region architecture to protect global services, argues Professor Feng Li, Associate Dean for Research & Innovation at Bayes Business School.“The Cloudflare outage is yet another reminder of how dependent major systems are on just a few cloud infrastructures across the world.“This latest episode, coupled with October’s AWS outage and the disruption that caused, should serve as yet another wake-up call for cloud providers to strengthen regional isolation, ensure critical control planes can fail safely, and maintain communicational transparency with users during such incidents.
This last point is critical because confidence in the provider often depends as much on timely, clear updates as on the speed of recovery itself,“For far too long now, people have used cloud services as a single point of reliability rather than accepting shared responsibility,With such dire consequences globally, multi-region or multi-cloud architecture must be implemented as a rapid failover,Incident response and customer communication plans should assume provider outages are a matter of when and not if,“Cloudflare will inevitably be the subject of user frustration and business disruption.
However, the longer-term erosion of confidence in cloud infrastructure and the broader digital ecosystem is far bigger problem.“This latest outage continues to beg the question of what happens when a digital infrastructure collapse in one part of the world can have such globally significant consequences? It is a question that regulators, enterprises, and researchers alike need to confront.”Big news in the world of media: Netflix has agreed to buy Warner Bros Discovery’s TV and film studios and streaming division for $72bn.The deal, worth $82.7bn once debt is included, means Netflix have beaten Paramount Skydance and Comcast to take control of one of Hollywood’s most prized and oldest assets, a move that will change the established film and TV landscape.
Announcing the deal, the two companies say:This acquisition brings together two pioneering entertainment businesses, combining Netflix’s innovation, global reach and best-in-class streaming service with Warner Bros.’ century-long legacy of world-class storytelling.Beloved franchises, shows and movies such as The Big Bang Theory, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, The Wizard of Oz and the DC Universe will join Netflix’s extensive portfolio including Wednesday, Money Heist, Bridgerton, Adolescence and Extraction, creating an extraordinary entertainment offering for audiences worldwide.Here’s our news story on today’s Cloudflare outage:Canva, the online graphic design tool, says its services have “fully recovered following the Cloudflare outage”.All systems are now operational, Canva reports, after being taken down by the Cloudflare outage.
Jake Moore, global cybersecurity adviser at ESET, has summed up the problem:“If a major provider like Cloudflare goes down for any reason, thousands of websites instantly become unreachable.“The problems often lie with the fact we are using an old network to direct internet users around the world to websites but it simply highlights there is one huge single point of failure in this legacy design.”The Metro newspaper reports that shopping sites wer affected by the Cloudflare IT problems too – such as Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, and H&M.H&M’s website is slow to load right now, but the other three seem to be working…Today’s Cloudflare outage is likely to intensify concerns that internet users are relying on too few technology providers.Tim Wright, technology partner at Fladgate, explains:“Cloudflare’s latest outage is another reminder that much of the internet runs through just a few hands.
Businesses betting on “always-on” cloud resilience are discovering its single points of failure,Repeated disruptions will draw tougher scrutiny from regulators given DORA, NIS2, and the UK’s emerging operational resilience regimes,Dependence on a small set of intermediaries may be efficient but poses a structural risk the digital economy cannot ignore,We can expect regulators to probe the concentration of critical functions in the cloud and edge layers — while businesses rethink whether convenience has quietly outpaced control,”Cloudflare’s System Status page shows that the problem that knocked many websites offline has been resolved.
Cloudflare insists the problem was not a cyber attack; instead, it appears to have been caused by a deliberate change made by its firewall handles data requests, to fix a security vulnerability,Cloudflare says:This incident has been resolved,A change made to how Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall parses requests caused Cloudflare’s network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning,This was not an attack; the change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components,We will share more information as we have it today.
An IT issue affecting air traffic control has forced Edinburgh Airport to halt all flights today,Edinburgh Airport said in a statement:“No flights are currently operating from Edinburgh Airport,“Teams are working on the issue and will resolve as soon as possible,”pic,twitter.
com/lTSCJyTVieThe Airport’s departure page is showing eight flights delayed and five cancelled, but passengers for many other flights are being told to go to the gate,Reports of problems at Cloudflare peaked at just after 9am UK time:Online video conferencing service Zoom, and Transport for London’s website (used for travel information in the capital), are among the sites hit by the Cloudflare outage,
Tesla launches cheaper version of Model 3 in Europe amid Musk sales backlash
Tesla has launched the lower-priced version of its Model 3 car in Europe in a push to revive sales after a backlash against Elon Musk’s work with Donald Trump and weakening demand for electric vehicles.Musk, the electric car maker’s chief executive, has argued that the cheaper option, launched in the US in October, will reinvigorate demand by appealing to a wider range of buyers.The new Model 3 Standard is listed at €37,970 (£33,166) in Germany, 330,056 Norwegian kroner (£24,473) and 449,990 Swedish kronor (£35,859). The move follows the launch of a lower-priced Model Y SUV, Tesla’s bestselling model, in Europe and the US.The cheaper Model 3 and Model Y cars drop some premium finishes and features of the more expensive versions, but still offer driving ranges above 300 miles (480km)
Russia blocks Snapchat and restricts Apple’s FaceTime, state officials say
Russian authorities blocked access to Snapchat and imposed restrictions on Apple’s video calling service, FaceTime, the latest step in an effort to tighten control over the internet and communications online, according to state-run news agencies and the country’s communications regulator.The state internet regulator Roskomnadzor alleged in a statement that both apps were being “used to organize and conduct terrorist activities on the territory of the country, to recruit perpetrators [and] commit fraud and other crimes against our citizens”. Apple did not respond to an emailed request for comment, nor did Snap Inc.The Russian regulator said it took action against Snapchat on 10 October, even though it only reported the move on Thursday. The moves follow restrictions against Google’s YouTube, Meta’s WhatsApp and Instagram, and the Telegram messaging service, itself founded by a Russian-born man, that came in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022
Google’s AI Nano Banana Pro accused of generating racialised ‘white saviour’ visuals
Nano Banana Pro, Google’s new AI-powered image generator, has been accused of creating racialised and “white saviour” visuals in response to prompts about humanitarian aid in Africa – and sometimes appends the logos of large charities.Asking the tool tens of times to generate an image for the prompt “volunteer helps children in Africa” yielded, with two exceptions, a picture of a white woman surrounded by Black children, often with grass-roofed huts in the background.In several of these images, the woman wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “Worldwide Vision”, and with the UK charity World Vision’s logo. In another, a woman wearing a Peace Corps T-shirt squatted on the ground, reading The Lion King to a group of children.The prompt “heroic volunteer saves African children” yielded multiple images of a man wearing a vest with the logo of the Red Cross
Chatbots can sway political opinions but are ‘substantially’ inaccurate, study finds
Chatbots can sway people’s political opinions but the most persuasive artificial intelligence models deliver “substantial” amounts of inaccurate information in the process, according to the UK government’s AI security body.Researchers said the study was the largest and most systematic investigation of AI persuasiveness to date, involving nearly 80,000 British participants holding conversations with 19 different AI models.The AI Security Institute carried out the study amid fears that chatbots can be deployed for illegal activities including fraud and grooming.The topics included “public sector pay and strikes” and “cost of living crisis and inflation”, with participants interacting with a model – the underlying technology behind AI tools such as chatbots – that had been prompted to persuade the users to take a certain stance on an issue.Advanced models behind ChatGPT and Elon Musk’s Grok were among those used in the study, which was also authored by academics at the London School of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Oxford and Stanford University
Irish authorities asked to investigate Microsoft over alleged unlawful data processing by IDF
Irish authorities have been formally asked to investigate Microsoft over alleged unlawful data processing by the Israeli Defense Forces.The complaint has been made by the human rights group the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) to the Data Protection Commission, which has legal responsibility in Europe for overseeing all data processing in the European Union.It follows revelations in August by the Guardian with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew outlet Local Call that a giant trove of Palestinians’ phone calls was being stored on Microsoft’s cloud service, Azure, as part of a mass surveillance operation by the Israeli military.The ICCL alleges that the processing of the personal data “facilitated war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide by Israeli military”. Microsoft’s European headquarters are located in Ireland
HyperVerse promoter ‘Bitcoin Rodney’ accuses Australian Sam Lee in US court of duping him with ‘elaborate deception’
A key promoter of an alleged global $3bn Ponzi scheme claims in newly filed US court documents he was trapped by an “elaborate” fraud orchestrated by Australian Sam Lee, and should be released from custody.Rodney Burton – known as Bitcoin Rodney – was charged in the US in early 2024 for his alleged part in the HyperVerse scheme, which swept the globe from 2020 and allegedly defrauded investors of US$1.89bn (A$2.9bn at current rates).Burton’s lavish lifestyle was regularly flaunted in his promotional videos, including his fleet of luxury cars and branded Lamborghini, diamond-encrusted watches and meals of steak and sausages enrobed with real gold
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