Cloudflare’s Second Outage in 3 Weeks Hits Coinbase, Others. The Stock Barely Budges.

Cloudflare helps manage and protect traffic for roughly 20% of the global web. (Dreamstime)

Key Points

• A Cloudflare outage on Friday morning briefly disrupted access to platforms like Coinbase, caused by a web application firewall change.
• Cloudflare’s stock initially fell by 6% in premarket trading but recovered, closing down 0.7% for the day.
• This marks the second Cloudflare outage in less than three weeks, following a similar disruption on November 18.

A Cloudflare outage early Friday morning briefly cut off access to popular platforms like Coinbase , in the second such disruption in less than three weeks.

The cybersecurity and cloud-services provider said in an update shortly after 4 a.m. Eastern time that a change made to its web application firewall “caused Cloudflare’s network to be unavailable for several minutes.”

Cloudflare stock fell as much as 6% in the premarket session before the incident was resolved, but the stock mostly recovered in regular trading, slipping 0.7%.

Coinbase was one of the platforms impacted by the outage, the cryptocurrency platform confirmed in a social media post Friday. Coinbase stock was down narrowly in the premarket session.

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Cloudflare helps manage and protect traffic for roughly 20% of the global web. Around the same time as the outage, users of platforms like DoorDash , Canva, and Zoom Communications also reported disruptions, according to Downdetector, a site that tracks problem reports.

This is the second outage within the past month for Cloudflare. On Nov. 18, the company reported widespread outages that knocked platforms like X, ChatGPT, and Spotify Technology offline.

While disruptions are frustrating for internet users, investors tend to quickly shrug them off. Cloudflare stock is up more than 3% since that Nov. 18 incident. When an Amazon Web Services outage in late October disrupted platforms like Reddit and Roblox, Amazon.com’s stock rose.

Write to Nate Wolf at nate.wolf@barrons.com