Scottish and UK parliament websites crash after major internet outage 

The websites for the Scottish and UK parliaments along with the social media platform X have been affected by an issue with the cloud computing provider Cloudflare. 

The outage has affected a wide range of websites including the popular tool to track internet outages, DownDetector. When accessing the page, a message appears asking users to “unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed”.  

At the time of writing, the lates update on the Cloudflare status pages says:

"We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts."

The outage began at around 11.30am, when visitors to websites started experiencing problems where websites refused to load. Cloudflare posted an update acknowledging the issue around 15 minutes later saying:

“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing. 

“We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly.” 

Cloudflare had scheduled maintenance on its SCL (Santiago) data center for today, with a warning that this may result in an increase in “latency during this maintenance window for end-users in the affected region.” This data centre is located in Chile, but it is unclear whether this scheduled maintenance caused the outage. 

This is the second outage to affect the Scottish Parliament after a “significant Microsoft outage” suspended all voting last month. The problem was caused by an issue within the Domain Name System (DNS) that operates as a virtual phonebook for the internet. An inadvertent change to this system within the Azure cloud left internet users locked out of applications and unable to access websites.