A widespread internet disruption affected websites and applications across Europe on Thursday, including a critically important outage of the Belgian national railway company, SNCB. The disruption prevented SNCB customers from accessing tickets and train information, and highlighted the reliance on core internet infrastructure for essential services. Cloudflare, a major internet services provider, acknowledged and worked to resolve the issue, which it later attributed to a deployed fix.
A widespread internet disruption impacted numerous websites and applications Thursday, with reports surfacing of outages affecting services across Europe.
The Belgian national railway company, SNCB, experienced a complete outage, preventing customers from purchasing tickets or accessing real-time train schedules and delay information.
The SNCB initially announced a fix around 2:15 PM local time, and service appeared to be restored for some users. However, reports of disruptions quickly resurfaced, indicating the issue was not fully resolved. The company stated it was continuing to work on restoring full service.
Cloudflare, a major internet infrastructure provider, announced at 2:34 PM that “We have deployed a change that has restored service to the dashboard. We are still working to correct the impact on all application services”.
And confirmed at 2:42 PM: “A fix has been deployed and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services return to normal.”
Services gradually returned to normal as the fix was implemented.
This is not the first time a Cloudflare outage has caused widespread disruption. Similar incidents occurred in July 2019 and June 2022, highlighting the critical role infrastructure providers play in maintaining internet stability. The outages underscore the potential for cascading failures across the web when core services experience issues.
