A major technical disruption at Cloudflare, a critical internet infrastructure company responsible for accelerating and securing an estimated 20% of the world’s websites, caused a massive global outage on Tuesday, leaving millions of users without access to high-profile platforms like X and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The widespread outage began around 11:20 a.m. UTC when the company’s internal network suffered an “internal service degradation.”
A Cloudflare spokesperson confirmed that the issue was caused by an “unusual spike in traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services,” which resulted in a cascade of HTTP 500 server errors (a common signal of server-side issues) around the world.
The impact of this disruption was immediate and far-reaching, impacting critical services such as Spotify, Canva, Discord, and various crypto exchanges.
Illustrating the web’s deep interdependence, trouble tracking site Downdetector was also briefly affected.
Cloudflare engineers temporarily disabled certain tools, including the WARP secure connectivity service, in key regions such as London as part of the remediation effort.
The company reported that service had been restored by early afternoon, but warned that error rates may continue to rise.
This incident is the latest in a series of high-profile cloud outages, following recent large-scale outages in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
The recurrence of these cascading failures has led to increased scrutiny of the extreme centralization of the modern Internet.
Experts argue that if foundational providers like Cloudflare falter, the result will be a global digital gridlock, exposing the inherent risks of relying on a few major companies for core web functions.