Several well-known websites, including X and ChatGPT, ran into problems on Tuesday after a serious issue at Cloudflare, a company that supports a large portion of global internet traffic.
How the Disruption Started
Downdetector began receiving reports shortly after 11:30 GMT, with users struggling to reach services such as Grindr, Zoom and Canva. Some pages wouldn’t load, while others displayed unexplained errors.
Cloudflare later confirmed that a configuration file meant to manage threat-related traffic behaved in an unexpected way and caused a crash within part of its traffic-handling software.
Cloudflare’s Response
The firm issued an apology and stated that any period of downtime falls below its own expectations. The main cause has been corrected, though some services may continue to settle as systems come back online.
During the disruption, X’s homepage displayed a notice indicating that an error linked to Cloudflare had affected its internal server. ChatGPT users saw a message asking them to unblock challenges on cloudflare.com before continuing.
Scale of the Impact
Downdetector, which many rely on for outage updates, briefly struggled under its own surge in visitors, highlighting how widespread the disruption became.
Cloudflare’s systems support roughly a fifth of global websites, helping them filter automated traffic and remain protected from hostile attempts to overload servers.
Alp Toker of NetBlocks said the event highlights how deeply Cloudflare’s infrastructure sits beneath many digital services, creating a point where faults can affect large numbers of sites at once.
No Sign of an Attack
Cloudflare emphasised that it had found no indication of malicious activity. Its share price dipped by about 3% shortly after 15:00 GMT following the announcement.
Wider Context
The incident follows issues at other major service providers in recent months. Amazon Web Services faced a disruption that temporarily pushed more than 1,000 sites offline, followed shortly afterwards by problems at Microsoft Azure.
Cybersecurity advisor Jake Moore commented that repeated outages show how heavily many organisations depend on a handful of large platforms for hosting and protection.
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