Cloudflare Down: A massive technical fault at Cloudflare has caused a widespread internet disruption, briefly taking major online platforms, including X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT, offline.
The outage, which began earlier this afternoon (around 11.30 am UK time), resulted in users globally being unable to load popular websites that rely on Cloudflare’s core infrastructure.
The scale of the disruption was immediately apparent, as a broad range of unrelated websites, such as the film review site Letterboxd, suddenly went down, echoing the impact of last month’s AWS outage. Affected users were met with a message indicating an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network” and a request to “please try again in a few minutes.”
Even Down Detector, the outage tracking website, struggled to load because it, too, depends on Cloudflare’s services. When it returned, it showed a dramatic spike in reported problems across various platforms.
Cloudflare provides key internet infrastructure, powering content delivery, security protections, and tools that keep websites online during high traffic or cyber attacks.
Its vital role behind a vast portion of the modern internet means that when its systems fail, the impact ripples far and wide.
In a public update, Cloudflare confirmed they were “aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers,” and that further details would be provided as they became available.
This incident serves as another stark reminder of how dependent the internet has become on a few central providers.