A major Cloudflare outage disrupted thousands of websites and digital services worldwide on Tuesday, affecting popular platforms including X, ChatGPT, and Spotify after issues began shortly after 11:30 GMT, according to BBC reporting. The outage impacted services that rely on Cloudflare's infrastructure, which handles content from 20% of the world's websites, according to PBS analysis.
Thousands of users reported issues to outage monitoring site Downdetector, with reports crossing thousands by evening as the disruption spread across multiple platforms and services, according to M reporting.
Technical Root Cause and Timeline
The outage began around 5:20 a.m. EST and was fully resolved at 9:30 a.m. EST, according to Usatoday reporting. Cloudflare identified the root cause as a configuration file designed to handle threat traffic that "did not work as intended and triggered a crash" in its software handling traffic for wider services, according to BBC coverage.
The configuration file grew beyond an expected size of entries, causing the system crash that affected multiple Cloudflare services simultaneously. At 10:40 a.m. EST Tuesday, Cloudflare provided a status update indicating that engineers were still mitigating lingering issues after posting a fix, according to PBS reporting.
"We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today," Cloudflare stated, emphasizing that "given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable," according to BBC coverage.
Major Platforms and Services Affected
The outage created widespread disruption across diverse digital platforms. Social media platform X displayed a message saying there was a problem with its internal server due to an error originating with Cloudflare, according to BBC reporting. Meanwhile, ChatGPT's site showed an error message telling users to "please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed."
Other affected platforms included Spotify, OpenAI services, Perplexity, Gemini, Canva, Letterboxd, Bet365, League of Legends, and Sage, according to M analysis. Business services were also impacted, with Moody's website displaying Error Code 500, according to PBS coverage.
Users reported encountering delays or technical issues when trying to access services such as Grindr, Zoom, and Canva throughout the outage period, according to BBC reporting.
Infrastructure and Transit System Impact
The outage extended beyond entertainment and social media platforms to critical infrastructure services. New Jersey Transit digital services were temporarily unavailable or slow to load, while New York City services were also impacted by the outage, according to PBS reporting.
Cloudflare's role as a "content delivery network" that mirrors content on thousands of servers worldwide made the outage particularly disruptive. As cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple explained to PBS, when problems flare up with Cloudflare, "it results in massive digital gridlock" for internet users because the company sits in the middle of connections between digital devices and websites.
Scale and Monitoring of Disruption
Downdetector, the outage monitoring site, recorded thousands of users reporting issues by 8 a.m. EST, according to Usatoday coverage. The monitoring service itself briefly experienced connectivity issues tied to the Cloudflare outage, according to the same reporting.
Tomshardware reported that Downdetector saw 11,201 reports of issues at 11:37 AM GMT, later dropping to 6,570 reports as fixes began making their way across the internet. Users started reporting issues around 11 AM, with reports escalating throughout the morning hours, according to M coverage.
Company Response and Recovery Efforts
Cloudflare acknowledged the severity of the situation early in the crisis, with the company stating it was "all hands on deck" to resolve traffic problems, according to Usatoday reporting. The San Francisco-based company confirmed there was no evidence the outage resulted from an attack or malicious activity.
While the main issue was resolved by 9:30 a.m. EST, Cloudflare warned that some services might still encounter errors as they came back online. The company expected brief degradation of some services as traffic naturally spiked post-incident, but anticipated all services would return to normal within several hours, according to Usatoday coverage.
Tomshardware noted that the company's system status page showed services had started to recover, though higher than normal error rates persisted while system administrators worked on fixing remaining issues.
Broader Context of Tech Infrastructure Outages
This incident represents the second major internet disruption of 2025, following an October malfunction of Amazon's cloud services unit AWS, according to Jpost reporting. The frequency of such outages highlights the vulnerability of internet infrastructure and the cascading effects when major service providers experience technical difficulties.
Last month, Microsoft Azure experienced an outage caused by a configuration change to Azure infrastructure, demonstrating that even the largest tech companies remain susceptible to configuration-related disruptions. These incidents underscore the critical importance of robust infrastructure management and the widespread dependence of modern digital services on a relatively small number of infrastructure providers.
Cloudflare's promise to "learn from today's incident and improve" reflects the ongoing challenge of maintaining stability for services that have become essential to global digital communications and commerce.