A sweeping outage at Cloudflare on Tuesday morning caused widespread disruption across the internet, impacting thousands of users globally who faced difficulties accessing high-profile services including ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), Gemini and Perplexity as well as popular platforms such as Spotify and Canva.
Cloudflare, which provides essential internet infrastructure and security services to more than a fifth of the web, first detected the internal service degradation at around 11:20 UTC (6:20 a.m. ET) when it noted “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services” that caused large volumes of traffic passing through its network to experience errors. The company immediately began investigating the issue, stating: “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.”
Users around the globe reported encountering blank feeds and “Internal server error” messages when trying to access X, while others on ChatGPT, Canva, Perplexity and beyond saw the platform either fail to load entirely or struggle with connectivity. The outage also hit even the outage-tracking site Downdetector, which experienced its own disruption because it relies on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
In its status updates, Cloudflare reported partial recoveries: access to several services such as its Access and WARP offerings were restored, and WARP access in London was re-enabled, yet the company warned that “customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates” while remediation was ongoing. The firm also noted that while most traffic for “most services continued to flow as normal,” there were elevated error levels across multiple services, and it still lacked full clarity on the root cause of the unusual traffic surge.
This incident underlines the fragility of the global internet ecosystem, where a failure at one major provider can cascade across countless websites and services dependent on a common infrastructure. Experts have pointed out that when an organisation of Cloudflare’s scale falters, the ripple effect is rapid and widespread. Previously, other large infrastructure providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have suffered outages that similarly brought major apps and websites to a halt.
While the recovery is already in motion, Cloudflare has not yet provided a definitive timeline for full normalisation of services. The company emphasises it remains “all hands on deck” until all traffic is processed without errors and the underlying cause of the anomaly has been addressed.
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