Trouble for online shops: This morning, customers were again temporarily unable to access retail websites. Rewe Group’s online shop was affected, as were Oetker’s Flaschenpost, Knuspr and many others. Amazon and the online shops of Wolt and Bofrost, on the other hand, remained accessible. At 10:15 am, however, the problem seemed to have been resolved.
Presumably, the internet service Cloudflare was down again. The 500 error message that customers of the affected retailers saw indicated another server outage at Cloudflare. In mid-November, there was already a major Cloudflare outage that also affected services such as Twitter (aka X) and ChatGPT.
Cloudflare itself has not yet reported on today’s outage on its website. Cloudflare is a US company that is used worldwide as a provider of IT infrastructure and internet security. Many well-known web applications use the company’s so-called DDoS defence. These are designed to protect websites from being paralysed by massive requests. However, the recurring problems with Cloudflare are slowly becoming a nuisance for retailers as well.
