Irish Organisations Urged to Prepare for Infrastructure Failures After Global Cloudflare Outage

A major internet infrastructure outage that disrupted access to services including X and ChatGPT today has prompted warnings from cybersecurity experts that Irish organisations must plan for similar failures.

The global outage at Cloudflare, one of the world's largest internet infrastructure providers, began this morning when the company reported a spike in unusual traffic, followed by service degradation across its network. Users worldwide experienced repeated error messages and timeouts, with monitoring sites logging thousands of outage reports at peak levels.

George Foley, spokesperson for ESET Ireland, said:

"This is exactly the kind of upstream failure that should be on every Irish organisation's risk register. Cloudflare sits quietly in front of a huge slice of the internet, and when it stumbles, the impact is instant. Your own servers and applications can be healthy, but staff and customers are locked out because DNS lookups, routing or security checks are failing somewhere else. If you build your entire digital front door on a single provider, you are accepting their bad day as your outage."

Cloudflare and similar providers act as gatekeepers for modern web traffic, translating web addresses into machine-readable numbers, filtering malicious requests, optimising performance and defending against denial-of-service attacks. A series of significant outages at major cloud and infrastructure providers in recent years has highlighted how concentrated these dependencies have become.

George Foley warned that Irish organisations face the same structural risks as larger markets.

"Ireland sells itself as a digital hub and hosts a dense cluster of data centres and cloud facilities, but that cuts both ways. If your payments, bookings, clinical systems or customer support all depend on the same handful of global platforms, then a routing issue in London or a misconfiguration in the United States is suddenly an Irish business problem. Outages like today are not rare black swan events. They are a predictable operational risk that belongs right beside ransomware and fraud in board conversations."

Recent research on UK and Irish organisations shows 22 per cent of respondents reported that high impact disruptions cost between €900,000 and €2.7 million per hour in lost revenue, with a median annual cost of €34 million once all incidents are totalled.

ESET Ireland is advising organisations to review their dependence on single providers for DNS, content delivery, identity and key SaaS platforms. Practical steps include introducing secondary DNS and failover options for critical services, documenting response procedures if major cloud or network providers fail, and running regular exercises based on scenarios where core services are unreachable despite healthy internal systems.

This resilience planning should complement ongoing work on patching, multi-factor authentication, least privilege access and continuous monitoring.

For more information, visit www.eset.com/ie