Internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare experiences widespread service disruption, taking down dozens of popular websites and platforms for millions worldwide.
If you couldn't access X, ChatGPT, or Spotify this morning, you weren't alone. A major outage at Cloudflare, one of the internet's key infrastructure providers, knocked out access to dozens of popular websites and services on Monday.
The disruption started around 6:00 AM ET, with users worldwide suddenly seeing "Internal Server Error" messages and HTTP 500 errors when trying to load their favorite sites. Cloudflare quickly acknowledged the problem on its status page, saying it was investigating "an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing."
What Went Down
The list of affected services reads like a who's who of the internet. X (formerly Twitter) saw over 9,700 user reports on Downdetector at the peak of the outage. OpenAI's ChatGPT and DALL-E services went dark. Design tool Canva stopped working. Music fans couldn't stream on Spotify. Gamers couldn't log into League of Legends or Valorant. Even PayPal and Uber Eats had intermittent hiccups.
In a bit of irony, Downdetector itself—the site people use to check if services are down—was also taken offline because it relies on Cloudflare. So users couldn't even easily track just how bad things were.
Why It Matters
Cloudflare isn't a household name, but it's absolutely critical to how the internet works. The company provides security, performance, and content delivery services to thousands of websites across its network spanning 330 cities in over 120 countries. When Cloudflare goes down, a huge chunk of the internet goes with it.
Users seeing error messages saying "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed" weren't dealing with broken websites. The sites themselves were fine. It was Cloudflare's security layer that had stopped working.
By 7:21 AM ET, Cloudflare said services were starting to recover, though "customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts." The company also had to temporarily disable its WARP service in London during the fix, affecting users who depend on it for internet access.
A Concerning Pattern
Here's what's worrying: this is the second major internet infrastructure outage in less than a month. Amazon Web Services had a similar failure recently that took down Venmo, Disney+, and Snapchat. These incidents highlight just how much the modern internet depends on a handful of companies.
The timing also raised eyebrows. Cloudflare had scheduled maintenance at its Santiago datacenter between 12:00 and 15:00 UTC on Monday. While the company hasn't confirmed whether the maintenance triggered the global meltdown, the coincidence has people asking questions.
Back Online, But Questions Remain
By mid-morning, most services were back up and running. Cloudflare reported that error rates were returning to normal levels and promised a detailed post-incident report once they fully understand what happened.
The company emphasized that "the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented," though specifics about the root cause haven't been released yet.
For the millions of people affected, it was a frustrating reminder of how fragile our digital infrastructure can be. As more of our work, entertainment, and daily life moves online, outages like this aren't just inconveniences—they're major disruptions that affect businesses and users worldwide.
Cloudflare is investigating the full scope of what happened, and more details are expected in the coming days.
