Cloudflare outage easing after impacting thousands of internet users

A global outage at web-infrastructure firm Cloudflare began to ease on Tuesday after preventing thousands from accessing major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT.

Cloudflare, whose network handles around a fifth of web traffic, said it started to investigate the internal service degradation around 6:40 a.m. ET. It has deployed a fix but some customers might still be impacted as it recovers service.

The incident marked the latest hit to major online services. An outage of Amazon’s cloud service last month caused global turmoil as thousands of popular websites and apps, including Snapchat and Reddit, were inaccessible due to the disruption.

Cloudflare – whose shares were down about 5% in premarket trading – runs one of the world’s largest networks that helps websites and apps load faster and stay online by protecting them from traffic surges and cyberattacks.

The latest outage prevented thousands of users from accessing platforms such as Canva, X, Grindr and ChatGPT, prompting users to log outage reports with Downdetector.

Reports about issues with Cloudflare had, however, come down to about 600 by 8 a.m. ET from a peak of nearly 5,000, the outage-tracking tool showed.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources. Since the numbers are based on user-submitted reports, the actual number of affected users may vary.

“We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors,” the company said in an emailed statement. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”

X and ChatGPT-creator OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Cloudflare is a vital internet infrastructure company that operates a critical layer of services between website users and host servers. It is most famous for its extensive global Content Delivery Network (CDN), which speeds up website loading by caching content on servers geographically closer to the user.

Beyond speeding up the web, Cloudflare is an essential provider of internet security, offering powerful Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection and web application firewalls that filter malicious traffic before it can overwhelm a site’s original host. It also provides highly reliable Domain Name System (DNS) services, acting as the internet’s “phone book” to direct user requests to the correct website IP addresses.

The reason a Cloudflare outage is such a significant global event stems from the sheer volume of internet traffic and services that rely on its network. Cloudflare proxies and provides services for approximately 20% of the entire web, meaning hundreds of thousands of websites and applications, including major platforms like financial services, media sites, and large tech companies, depend on its continuous operation.

When a technical failure occurs within Cloudflare’s core infrastructure, it creates a massive single point of failure that immediately and simultaneously cripples access to a substantial portion of the internet, often causing users to see network error pages instead of their intended website content.

A system failure at Cloudflare triggers a damaging cascading effect. The websites using its services suddenly lose access to the critical functions that ensure both speed and security. This loss of service impacts more than just availability; it means the protected sites lose their primary defense against attacks.

Without Cloudflare’s security layer and DDoS mitigation, affected websites are left vulnerable, and users may be entirely blocked from accessing content due to the failure of the core DNS resolution and caching mechanisms. This dependence highlights the risk of internet centralization, where a disruption in one key service provider can instantaneously plunge millions of users worldwide into an outage.