Cloudflare Outage Causes Global Internet Disruption — X, ChatGPT & Major Sites Down

A major outage at Cloudflare, one of the world’s leading internet infrastructure providers, caused widespread service disruptions on Tuesday, impacting thousands of websites and online platforms across the globe.

The incident began at approximately 11:20 AM UTC, when Cloudflare reported a spike in unusual internal traffic that led to service degradation. Popular platforms including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, and several WordPress-based websites experienced loading failures, slowdowns, or complete outages.

Website outage tracker Downdetector recorded thousands of error reports within minutes, as users struggled to access various services.

Cloudflare’s official status page initially stated:

“Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service.”

A few hours later, the company confirmed partial recovery, adding:

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

The issue was not the result of a cyberattack. According to Cloudflare, the disruption was caused by an automatically generated configuration file that grew larger than expected, crashing key components of its traffic-handling system.

Cybersecurity watchdog NetBlocks independently verified that the outage was global and not linked to any regional restrictions or shutdowns.

As Cloudflare continues investigating the root cause, users and businesses may still encounter intermittent issues. A full post-incident report is expected from the company in the coming days.

This disruption highlights the critical role Cloudflare plays in global internet infrastructure and the risks associated with centralized dependencies in digital operations.