A significant outage at Cloudflare caused widespread disruptions across the internet on Tuesday, temporarily taking down major platforms and services used by millions. The incident affected global users and highlighted the critical role Cloudflare plays in the digital infrastructure that supports a large share of the modern web.
Impact on Major Websites
Dozens of prominent platforms experienced downtime due to the outage. Impacted services included Shopify, Indeed, Truth Social, X, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, and multiple NJ Transit digital tools. Downdetector even reported its own access issues while tracking failures across the web. OpenAI confirmed that both ChatGPT and its Sora video app were affected because of a dependency on an external service provider.
Most services began returning online within a few hours. Cloudflare issued an update around mid-morning indicating that a fix had been deployed, though some users continued to encounter dashboard access issues as systems stabilized.
Cause of the Outage
Cloudflare attributed the disruption to an automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic. The file expanded beyond its expected size, triggering a software crash that impaired traffic routing across several services. According to the company, unusual traffic patterns were first detected at approximately 5:20 a.m. ET.
The company emphasized that there is no indication of malicious activity. Instead, the outage resulted from internal configuration errors. Cloudflare apologized for the incident, noting that outages of this scale are unacceptable given the company’s central role in safeguarding and managing internet traffic for about 20% of websites.
Wider Context in Global Network Stability
This incident comes during a period of increased strain and complexity across global cloud infrastructure. In recent weeks, Amazon Web Services endured a lengthy disruption affecting numerous platforms, followed by outages impacting Microsoft’s Azure and 365 services. In mid-2024, a faulty CrowdStrike software update caused one of the most widespread outages in recent memory, halting airline operations, disrupting banks, and delaying medical procedures.
Tuesday’s Cloudflare outage reinforces concerns about the vulnerability of the interconnected services that support modern internet operations. With businesses and public systems relying heavily on a few large providers, even a single technical failure can ripple worldwide within minutes.
Cloudflare’s outage briefly disrupted some of the world’s most heavily used online platforms, underscoring the essential role the company plays in global internet stability. While services have largely recovered, the incident adds to a growing list of infrastructure failures that highlight the need for stronger resilience, improved configuration safeguards, and increased redundancy across cloud systems.
