Cloudflare Outage Resolved; Baylor Websites and Other Internet Platforms Disrupted

At 5:48 a.m, Cloudfare, a cloud-based service that hosts Baylor's websites and many other online platforms, including X/Twitter and OpenAI (ChatGPT), reported anomalous activity that caused a degradation in service. Within 30 minutes, the degradation became a complete outage that disrupted services across the Internet. By 9:00 a.m., the issue had been identified and service was restored.

A spokesperson for Cloudflare indicated that the outage resulted from a "configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic" that unexpectedly grew too large. The company stressed that the outage was not the result of a cyberattack. Dutton apologized to their customers and "the Internet in general" for the outage with a promise that the company will learn from today's events and improve.

When these incidents occur, BaylorITS establishes contact with our vendor partners immediately to discern whether the issue is local. In cases like this and last month's Amazon AWS outage, all we can do is monitor updates from our partners who work to resolve uptime issues in the hope that the problem is resolved quickly. Our team updates Baylor's System Status site (systemstatus.baylor.edu) as we receive the latest information.

During the Cloudflare outage, Baylor's Canvas and Ignite systems were not affected, although the common links to these platforms were unavailable. For future reference, these platforms can be reached directly using the following links:

Canvas: baylor.instructure.com
Ignite: ejof.fa.us2.oraclecloud.com/fscmUI/faces/FuseOverview

If you have questions about the website issues Baylor experienced this morning, please contact HelpDesk+ on the main floor of Moody Memorial Library, call (254) 710-4357, or visit with one of our support representatives via HelpDesk+ Chat at helpdesk.baylor.edu. To monitor the status of Baylor's systems, visit systemstatus.baylor.edu.