A major Cloudflare outage early Tuesday disrupted tens of thousands of websites and leading online services worldwide, briefly bringing down platforms such as ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), Spotify, Canva, Uber, and more. The outage, which lasted just over an hour, has reignited concerns about internet reliability and the risks of widespread connectivity relying on a single infrastructure provider.
What Happened and Who Was Hit
Cloudflare , which provides critical web security, content delivery, and DNS services for over 26 million websites, reported an “unusual traffic spike” around 6:20 a.m. ET that triggered software failures across key data centers. Users on multiple continents encountered 500 error messages and failed logins as global traffic was rerouted or temporarily lost. High-profile platforms like X, ChatGPT, OpenAI, Spotify, Perplexity, Uber, Letterboxd, and numerous news and e-commerce sites were affected, with DownDetector tracking more than 10,000 user complaints at the peak of the incident.
How Cloudflare Responded
Cloudflare engineers quickly identified the software glitch, rolled back problematic changes, and began restoring services within an hour. By midmorning, most sites and apps had recovered, but some regional disruptions persisted as network routing stabilized. Cloudflare issued an apology to businesses and users, vowing to “strengthen resilience” and release a technical post-mortem explaining the root cause and preventive steps.
The Bigger Picture for Internet Stability
The incident underscores the central role that Cloudflare and similar infrastructure companies play in the digital ecosystem, as even brief outages can ripple across news, finance, gaming, and retail platforms. Industry experts warn that increasing digital consolidation, while boosting security and speed, leaves the web more vulnerable to systemic failure, spurring calls for greater redundancy and transparency after major disruptions.