Large parts of the internet briefly lurched into chaos on Tuesday when Cloudflare, one of the world’s most widely used web infrastructure providers, suffered a rapid and unexpected failure.
Visitors trying to access platforms such as X, ChatGPT, Letterboxd, Shopify, Indeed and even outage-tracker Downdetector were instead met with error pages blaming issues on Cloudflare’s network.
For many, the internet appeared to stall without warning.
Cloudflare confirmed it was investigating an issue that “potentially impacts multiple customers,” later describing the incident as a “significant outage”.
The disruption traced back to an automatically generated configuration file used to filter threat traffic.
That file “grew beyond an expected size of entries,” the company said, triggering a crash in the software layer that manages traffic across multiple Cloudflare services.
The problem started around 5:20 a.m. ET, when engineers noticed an unusual spike in traffic.
As the system faltered, websites relying on Cloudflare’s network began failing in quick succession.
Many users saw messages referencing an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network,” while ChatGPT told visitors: “please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed.”
Cloudflare stressed the issue was not caused by any external intrusion.
“The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind.”
A broad list of services went offline or slowed to a crawl.
X displayed warnings that its homepage could not load due to an “error” coming from Cloudflare.
Grindr, Zoom, Canva, NJ Transit’s digital services and even Anthropic’s Claude chatbot were all affected.
Downdetector, usually the first port of call for outage reports, briefly failed under the same Cloudflare-related errors.
When it could be accessed, it showed a sharp spike in problem reports shortly after 11:30 GMT.
Alp Toker, director of internet observatory NetBlocks, said the scale of disruption “points to a catastrophic disruption to Cloudflare's infrastructure”.
He noted that a growing number of sites “hide behind Cloudflare infrastructure to avoid denial of service attacks,” which has turned the company into “one of the internet's largest single points of failure.”
By late morning, the company said it had implemented a fix.
Cloudflare wrote on its status page,
“We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”
It warned some customers might still see problems as systems stabilised.
Source: Cloudflare’s status page
Cloudflare added:
“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today.”
The company, which protects and manages traffic for roughly 20% of global websites, saw its shares fall more than 2% shortly after the incident.
The breakdown follows a turbulent run of failures across the world’s biggest cloud providers.
In recent weeks, Amazon Web Services endured a daylong interruption that disabled more than 1,000 apps and websites.
Microsoft’s Azure and 365 platforms also experienced global disruptions.
Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET, said the events highlight how companies “are often forced to heavily rely on the likes of Cloudflare, Microsoft, and Amazon for hosting their websites and services, as there aren't many other options.”
And for the second time in less than a year, the web has been reminded how a single configuration error — whether at Cloudflare, Amazon, Microsoft or even cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, whose faulty update in July 2024 grounded flights and delayed hospital procedures — can ripple instantly across the online world.
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