Cloudflare’s CEO has threatened to withdraw services from Italy after receiving a fine from the nation’s communications regulator, AGCOM, for violating anti-piracy regulations. AGCOM, enforcing Italy’s “Piracy Shield” law, requested that Cloudflare block certain sites, which it allegedly failed to do, leading to a fine of one percent of its annual revenue. In response, the CEO criticized AGCOM’s actions as censorship and a threat to democratic values, vowing to appeal the fine and potentially remove all services from Italy, including free services to the upcoming Winter Olympics. The CEO has also stated he will bring the issue to the attention of the Trump administration, while also stating that he would be open to a dialogue to resolve the issues.
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On Tuesday, Cloudflare, a major US company providing internet infrastructure services, experienced an unidentified issue causing error messages and outages for some of its customers’ websites. The problem, which began around 11:20 am London time, resulted in elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services and impacted sites like X and OpenAI. Cloudflare implemented a fix by 2:48 pm, though the cause of the unusual traffic spike remained unknown. This incident underscores the internet’s reliance on a limited number of key infrastructure providers, as described by experts such as Professor Alan Woodward.
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Several major online platforms, including X, Spotify, and ChatGPT, experienced outages due to issues with Cloudflare’s internal services. These outages, first reported around 11 am, affected thousands of users and multiple websites, with some services briefly returning before encountering further problems. Cloudflare, a significant web infrastructure provider, identified the issue and was implementing a fix, stating that a fifth of all global websites use its services. Experts noted that these outages highlight a trend of reliance on a small number of cloud providers, which can lead to widespread disruption when these platforms experience issues.
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John Q. Hosedrinker