Cloudflare Outage Sparks Global Disruptions as X, ChatGPT and Other Major Platforms Report Problems
A widespread internet disruption on Tuesday has left thousands of users unable to access major sites, with social platform X and OpenAI’s ChatGPT among those hit. The problems stem from issues at Cloudflare, one of the companies that sits quietly behind huge portions of the modern internet.
Reports of outages began piling up just after 11:30 GMT, according to Downdetector. Soon after, Cloudflare confirmed it was looking into “an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers” and promised updates once it understood the full situation. Later, the firm said, “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
Cloudflare handles security and traffic management for an enormous slice of the web — it says about 20% of all sites use its services — which is why even a small glitch can send shockwaves across the internet. Some users also complained of access problems across Facebook, AWS, Spotify, Canva, bet365, League of Legends and other major platforms. OpenAI confirmed it was investigating issues with ChatGPT but didn’t directly link the problem to Cloudflare. At one stage, Cloudflare’s own status site wouldn’t load.
This isn’t the first time a single point of failure has knocked out large parts of the internet. Recent outages at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure also took down hundreds of services. Cloudflare itself has had similar incidents in the past, including major outages in 2019 and 2022 that briefly took entire chunks of the web offline.
Cybersecurity expert Graeme Stuart said Tuesday’s events fit a worrying pattern. Platforms like Cloudflare, he explained, are “vast, efficient and used by almost every part of modern life.” When something goes wrong, “the impact spreads far and fast and everyone feels it at once.” He added that these failures often happen because “a single layer they all rely on stopped responding,” exposing how many organisations still rely on one main route with “no meaningful backup.” Stuart warned that despite the internet being designed to be resilient, “we have ended up concentrating huge amounts of global traffic into a handful of cloud providers.”
As services continue to recover, Cloudflare says it is still working to understand the full scope of the issue — and users worldwide were reminded once again how fragile the online world can be.
