A widespread internet outage struck on Tuesday morning, taking down some of the world’s most popular websites and services in a disruption that highlighted the fragility of modern internet infrastructure. Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare was hit by an outage that knocked several major websites offline for global users, with many sites recovering within a few hours.
The Scope of the Disruption
The outage began around 5:20 a.m. Eastern Time and affected a vast array of online services. E-commerce platform Shopify, job search engine Indeed, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, President Donald Trump’s Truth Social and Elon Musk’s social media platform X were among the sites impacted by the Cloudflare issues. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Spotify, and even McDonald’s self-service ordering systems were also caught in the digital chaos.
The irony was not lost on observers: even Downdetector, the website many users turn to during outages, was itself knocked offline by the Cloudflare problems, making it difficult for users to confirm whether they were experiencing isolated issues or part of a broader disruption.
What Caused the Outage?
A Cloudflare spokesperson said the root cause of the outage was an automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic that grew beyond an expected size of entries, which triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for several of its services. The company emphasized that there was no evidence of malicious activity or a cyberattack.
Cloudflare first acknowledged the problems on its status page at 11:48 a.m. UTC, announcing that some services may be intermittently impacted. About 90 minutes later, the company reported it had identified the issue and implemented changes that allowed services to begin recovering.
The Ripple Effects
The outage’s impact extended far beyond tech platforms. A Reddit user photographed McDonald’s self-service ordering system displaying Cloudflare errors, while public transportation systems like NJ Transit also experienced disruptions to their digital services. Even nuclear power plants were affected, with background check systems becoming temporarily unavailable.
The financial markets took notice as well. Shares of Cloudflare slid more than 2% following the incident.
A Broader Pattern of Internet Vulnerability
This incident comes as the latest in a series of major internet infrastructure failures. The issue comes less than a month after Amazon Web Services suffered a daylong disruption that took down numerous online services, followed by a global outage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud and 365 services.
Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey noted that this incident shows how reliant important internet-based services are on relatively few major players. The concentration of so much of the internet’s infrastructure in the hands of companies like Cloudflare, AWS, and Microsoft means that when one of these systems fails, the effects cascade across countless platforms and services.
Cloudflare’s Response
Cloudflare implemented a fix to resolve the outage around 9:57 a.m. ET, though it noted some users may still experience issues accessing its online dashboard. The company issued an apology, with a spokesperson stating: “Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologize to our customers and the internet in general for letting you down today.”
What is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare provides a form of internet shield, preventing some forms of attack and unwanted visits from bots, as well as acting as a global distribution network for content for its clients. The company’s services are used by major brands worldwide, making its infrastructure critical to the functioning of large portions of the internet.
The downside of being a gatekeeper and distribution network for such big brands is that if this vital system fails, no one can use your service be that website or app.
Looking Forward
The incident raises important questions about internet infrastructure resilience and the wisdom of concentrating so much of the web’s functionality in the hands of a few major providers. As our digital infrastructure becomes increasingly critical to daily life—from ordering food to accessing healthcare to conducting business—the need for robust backup systems and distributed infrastructure becomes ever more apparent.
Cloudflare has promised a detailed post-incident analysis, which should provide valuable insights into how such failures can be prevented in the future. For now, the incident serves as a reminder of how interconnected and potentially fragile our digital ecosystem has become.
