A widespread Cloudflare outage on Tuesday briefly took down parts of the internet — including ChatGPT, X, and customer websites across the globe — as the web infrastructure giant scrambled to fix a major networking issue.
What happened
Cloudflare said it was investigating a problem “potentially impacting multiple customers,” with disruptions rippling across services that rely on its network as a protective and performance-enhancing layer. Even Cloudflare’s own status page struggled to load at one point.
- The company also reported issues with its customer support portal.
- The outage coincided with scheduled maintenance in some regions earlier in the day — though it’s unclear whether the events were linked.
Why it matters
Cloudflare sits at the center of the modern internet. Hundreds of thousands of companies use its infrastructure to shield websites from attacks, manage traffic, and keep their services running at scale. When Cloudflare goes down, the internet feels it.
Flashback: This isn’t the first time Cloudflare has suffered major disruptions.
- July 2019: A software bug overloaded parts of Cloudflare’s network, taking down thousands of sites for up to 30 minutes. Medium, Discord, Shopify, SoundCloud, Coinbase, and Dropbox were among those affected.
- June 2022: Another outage hit 19 key data centers, disrupting a significant portion of global traffic for more than 90 minutes.
Between the lines
Cloudflare’s role as internet infrastructure means even small glitches can snowball into global downtime, a reminder of how dependent critical online services have become on a handful of backend providers.
What’s next
Cloudflare says it is continuing to investigate and restore normal operations. No timeline has yet been given for a root-cause explanation.
Source: Bloomberg
