By Tabby Glover, Master’s of Law
On November 18, technical problems at Cloudflare, an internet security company, resulted in their ‘worst outage’ of services of websites including ChatGPT, X, and Spotify.
The University’s IT status website confirmed at 3:26 pm November 19, that following Cloudflare's disruption being resolved, University of Bristol websites are functioning as normal.
The University’s IT Services Status Page alerted students to the outage on November 18, 2:16 pm:
‘We're aware of an outage of Cloudflare services globally. Unfortunately, this is out of the University's remit and we must wait for the third party to resolve this issue.’
Cloudflare restored their services by the following morning, November 19.
The University of Bristol’s IT department confirmed to Epigram that some students had faced issues with the Check-in app, used to record attendance.
‘It was deeply frustrating that I was unable to access ChatGPT for uses strictly in compliance with the university’s AI usage policy and nothing more’, explained one second year chemist.
An international MA Law student who faced issues with the Check-in app disruption, and said they were ‘stressed and worried’ about the impact on her attendance record.
The ProQuest Ebook Central website, used to access University e-books, also experienced several hours of issues.
A University spokesperson said:
‘Tuesday's Cloudflare outage was outside of the University's remit.
‘A small number of students had issues accessing the student check-in app because of this – the vast majority were able to use it as normal.
‘If anyone has concerns, it’s best to raise these directly with their school.’
Cloudflare’s systems are ‘online and functioning normally’ according to Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, who apologised for the outage.
The internet company said that the technical problem was due to a file designed to handle traffic malfunctioning.
Featured image: Epigram / Sophie Maclaren
