Cloudflare is Down, Taking Millions of Websites Offline Globally

Cloudflare faced a widespread network disruption on Tuesday morning, leaving users unable to access millions of popular websites and services reliant on its infrastructure.

The San Francisco-based company, which provides content delivery and security for a significant portion of the web, confirmed the issue affected its global operations, with reports of errors emerging around 11 a.m. UTC.

Sites including X, OpenAI's ChatGPT, League of Legends, Spotify, Facebook, Telegram, and Letterboxd displayed "internal server error" messages or failed to load entirely, impacting millions of users worldwide.

The outage prompted thousands of complaints on platforms like Downdetector, where spikes in reports for X reached over 20,000 in the United States alone within minutes.

Cloudflare updated its status page to acknowledge the problem, stating it was "investigating an issue impacting multiple data centers in our Global Network."

Screenshot of Cloudflare Status page.

By midday, partial recovery began, but the firm warned of lingering effects.

"We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts," read a follow-up update from Cloudflare.

Engineers at Cloudflare worked to pinpoint the cause, which appeared tied to connectivity failures across multiple regions, though no specific trigger was immediately disclosed.

The incident echoed previous disruptions at the company, such as a June event that took large swaths of the internet offline, halting access to Twitch, Etsy, Discord, and Google services for hours.

That earlier outage stemmed from a configuration error during routine maintenance, exposing vulnerabilities in the centralized web infrastructure that triggered the internal server error code 500 for millions of sites and services that are using Cloudflare as their SSL and CDN provider.

Users on unaffected social media channels shared frustrations, with one post noting, "Cloudflare is down globally. So if you find the Internet acting weirdly, captchas failing, sites behaving oddly, stuff not working that was a few minutes ago... this is probably why."

Another described the scope: "Cloudflare suffered an outage, disrupting services for thousands of users across websites that rely on the company’s network infrastructure.

OpenAI's ChatGPT, Perplexity, X and Gemini are some of the major websites affected by the outage."

The company, founded in 2009, has grown to handle traffic for over 30 million internet properties, making its networks a backbone for online commerce, communication, and entertainment.

Past incidents, including a 2022 power failure at a data center that caused similar widespread downtime, have highlighted risks in relying on single providers for critical web functions.

Cloudflare's team continued mitigation efforts into the afternoon, with full resolution expected soon, according to ongoing status reports, as the issue is still there and millions of sites are still down.