A major Cloudflare outage caused several popular services to go offline on Tuesday, affecting millions of users worldwide. The incident hit key platforms including X and ChatGPT, leading to widespread reports of errors and slow loading times. The scale and impact of the disruption highlight how dependent the internet has become on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
What Caused the Cloudflare Outage?
The Cloudflare outage X ChatGPT users experienced began shortly after 11:30 GMT. Thousands of people reported issues through Downdetector. Cloudflare later confirmed that a “significant outage” was caused by a faulty configuration file. The file was meant to manage “threat traffic,” but instead triggered a major software crash.
This system controls traffic for many of Cloudflare’s core services.
Cloudflare apologised, stating that “any outage is unacceptable.” The company has since fixed the issue, although some users may still see errors as systems come back online.
Which Services Were Affected?
The outage hit a wide range of sites and apps. Users reported delays, login failures, and error messages while accessing popular platforms. Affected services included:
- X
- ChatGPT
- Zoom
- Grindr
- Canva
- Multiple major news outlets
- Even Downdetector itself
X displayed internal server error messages caused by the Cloudflare disruption. ChatGPT also produced an error telling users to unblock challenges from cloudflare.com.
What Is Cloudflare and Why Is It Important?
Cloudflare provides internet security and performance infrastructure for millions of websites. Its services check whether site visitors are humans or bots, protect against attacks, and optimise speed. Cloudflare says around 20% of all global websites use some form of its technology.
When Cloudflare goes down, large parts of the internet go with it.
Alp Toker, director of NetBlocks, called the incident “a catastrophic disruption,” noting that so many websites rely on Cloudflare to defend against denial-of-service attacks.
This dependence, he argued, has made it “one of the internet’s largest single points of failure.”
No Signs of a Cyberattack
Cloudflare stressed that the outage was the result of a technical failure, not a malicious attack. The company stated:
“There is no evidence that this was caused by hacking or targeted activity.”
Its stock price dipped about 3% shortly after 15:00 GMT as news of the outage spread.
A Pattern of Recent Infrastructure Failures
The Cloudflare outage X ChatGPT users experienced comes after a series of recent disruptions across major web providers. Last month, Amazon Web Services suffered a large outage that took more than 1,000 websites offline. Shortly afterward, Microsoft Azure reported a similar incident.
Jake Moore, cybersecurity advisor at ESET, said these events show “a growing reliance on fragile networks” controlled by a few major companies.
He added that many businesses rely heavily on Cloudflare, Amazon, and Microsoft due to limited alternatives.
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