Internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare experienced a significant outage on Tuesday, disrupting access to several major websites for users worldwide.
Although many affected platforms were restored within hours, Cloudflare confirmed in a status update at 9:57 a.m. ET that a fix had been deployed. The company noted that some users might still face intermittent difficulties accessing the Cloudflare dashboard as systems stabilise.
“We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” the company said.
According to Downdetector — which itself briefly went offline — multiple high-profile platforms were impacted. These included e-commerce leader Shopify, job search engine Indeed, Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot, Donald Trump’s Truth Social and Elon Musk’s social platform X. NJ Transit also reported disruptions across some of its digital services.
OpenAI confirmed that ChatGPT and its Sora video-generation app had fully recovered after experiencing issues linked to a “third-party service provider.”
A Cloudflare spokesperson later revealed the root cause of the incident: an automatically generated configuration file designed to manage threat traffic had expanded far beyond its expected size, causing a critical crash within the software responsible for handling traffic across multiple Cloudflare services.
The company reported noticing a “spike in unusual traffic” around 5:20 a.m. ET, though it stressed that there was no evidence the outage was caused by an attack or malicious activity.
“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” the spokesperson said. “We apologize to our customers and the internet in general for letting you down today.”
Cloudflare’s technology underpins a significant portion of the global web, securing and managing traffic for roughly 20% of all internet sites. Its services include protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which attempt to overwhelm websites with excessive traffic.
Following the disruption, Cloudflare’s shares dipped more than 2%.
This outage comes just weeks after Amazon Web Services faced a daylong disruption that affected thousands of online services, followed by a global outage impacting Microsoft Azure and 365 systems. In July 2024, a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered worldwide downtime, halting flights, affecting banks and delaying hospital procedures.
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