Cloudflare outage disrupts X, ChatGPT and thousands of sites
Global Impact Spans Major Platforms
DownDetector recorded over 10,000 user complaints by midday in multiple regions, with 61% of reported issues related to mobile applications, 28% to website access, and 11% to server connection failures. The outage affected users across the United States, United Kingdom, and India, with the first spike in problems reported around 6:08 a.m. ET.
Affected services extended beyond social media to include League of Legends, Spotify, Letterboxd, and Donald Trump's Truth Social platform. In an ironic twist, DownDetector itself—the primary service users rely on to check outage reports—experienced difficulties due to its dependence on Cloudflare's security infrastructure.
Infrastructure Dependency Concerns
Cloudflare provides critical internet infrastructure services to millions of websites worldwide, handling an average of 78 million HTTP requests per second. The company's services include protection against cyber attacks and tools to keep websites online during heavy traffic periods.
By 12:03 UTC, Cloudflare stated it was "continuing to investigate" the issue and working to "understand the full impact and mitigate this problem." One source indicated services began recovering later in the day, though customers continued to observe "higher-than-normal error rates."
The incident comes shortly after a major Amazon Web Services outage affected multiple platforms last month. Both disruptions have renewed concerns about the internet's dependence on a small number of infrastructure providers, as single points of failure can cascade across thousands of seemingly unconnected websites and services.
