Irish Casinos Affected by Cloudflare Outage

What caused the Cloudflare outage?

Cloudflare’s widespread failure (reported at around 11:20am GMT) was caused by an internal service error, not a cyber-attack. In basic terms, the cause for this stemmed from a routine update, which made a crucial bot-management configuration file balloon too large, far exceeding a software size limit. This triggered numerous HTTP 5xx messages, also known as “internal service errors” for us regular folk.

Although traffic was largely restored by 2:20pm GMT, complete recovery took several hours. This incident once again demonstrated our fragile reliance on major infrastructure providers, following a similar disruption at Amazon Web Services last month.

Which sites were affected because of the incident?

Worldwide, popular platforms like X, Canva, Letterboxd, Facebook and Grindr all went down, or struggled to respond in time. Ironically, even outage trackers like Downdetector took a blow. In the iGaming sphere, bet365 casino was severely affected, with its website and mobile services experiencing significant downtime for much of the day.

Were Irish casinos down because of the Cloudflare issues?

Not even good old-fashioned Irishluck could prevent the outage; it rippled across the country, impacting the iGaming industry both locally and globally. 

Well-known sportsbooks and casino sites that count on Cloudflare for HTML support, security, and payments were thrown into chaos almost immediately. bet365 for example confirmed that their downtime lasted hours, upsetting ongoing bets and cash flow. 

In terms of how we were affected, most of the casinos we recommend at IrishLuck got hit pretty badly. It’s worth noting that only two were alive and well during the outage - Robocat and BetLabel - with everyone else encountering issues. Happily, everything has now been resolved so we can all get back playing.

Unfortunately, all other connections went offline or became unreachable for players relying on Cloudflare’s infrastructure. It was a chaotic morning in the office, as I’m sure it was for Irish players.

Coming fast on the heels of Amazon’s recent downtime, this latest outage is a clear wake-up call. For industry titans like bet365, these back-to-back disruptions highlight the precarious reality of our dependence on third-party providers like Cloudflare and the fragility of the internet as a whole.