Cloudflare, which undergirds more than a third of the world’s internet traffic and security infrastructure, experienced a worldwide outage on Tuesday that briefly took down systems run by tens of thousands of websites, including ChatGPT and X (formerly Twitter). The company said the problem had been addressed, but experts say the incident highlights just how fragile even the sprawling digital infrastructure relied upon by tech giants can be.
By around 6:20 a.m. ET, some users had started posting error messages and access failures of various services. Cloudflare, whose status page recorded “internal service degradation” and later identified the cause as a software fault linked to a configuration file that helps it to manage threat traffic. The file “grew beyond an expected size” and crashed several subsystems, company reps explained.
Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, Dane Knecht, admitted the failure publicly in a post on X: “Earlier today we failed our customers and the Internet as a whole.” He continued: “We vow to do better.” He said that the issue was not malicious, but rather “a latent bug in a service underlying our bot mitigation capability.”
The power loss affected a large area. Streaming apps including Spotify and transit systems like NJ Transit reported disruptions. Web titans and corporate customers alike suffered after Cloudflare, which helps route traffic to the internet and protects sites from certain cyberattacks, fell offline as it was hit by some sort of technical glitch.
Cloudflare says it applied the fix around 9:42 a.m. ET, and that network is now believed to be operating normally again. The company is still investigating leftover problems, posting a comprehensive post-mortem examination of this incident in the future.
For businesses and consumers alike, the outage underscores one critical risk: consolidation of web infrastructure into just a few crucial providers. Once one falls, the ripples spread quickly. In a way, the incident is not merely embarrassing – it’s also an alarm signal for the next generation of internet fault tolerance.
The bottom line: Cloudflare is back online, but the rest of the internet once again realized how dependent it has become on a single gear in the machine — and how unnerving it is when that gear seizes.
