Cloudflare outage cripples major websites globally – Tech Digest

Share

A significant disruption to the internet on Tuesday saw countless high-profile services, including X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI’s ChatGPT – and even Tech Digest – knocked offline for several hours.

The outage was traced back to problems affecting Cloudflare, the massive internet infrastructure and security provider.

The issues began shortly after 11:30 GMT (6:30 a.m. ET), with thousands of users rapidly reporting errors to outage monitoring sites.

The affected services were widespread and included key players in social media, e-commerce, and AI. Sites like X, ChatGPT, e-commerce giant Shopify, the job search engine Indeed, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, and even President Donald Trump’s Truth Social were inaccessible to many.

Cloudflare serves a critical function for approximately 20% of all websites globally, providing essential services such as security, bot-checking, and protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, where malicious actors attempt to overwhelm a website with excessive traffic.

This widespread reliance, while convenient, has also made Cloudflare, in the words of NetBlocks director Alp Toker, “one of the internet’s largest single points of failure.”

The firm acknowledged the issue swiftly, stating on its service status dashboard that it had observed “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC,” which subsequently caused errors for traffic passing through its vast global network. While the company quickly assembled an “all hands-on deck” response, they noted they did not immediately know the cause of the traffic spike itself.

The disruption began to ease within a few hours. By 9:57 a.m. ET, Cloudflare confirmed it had “deployed a change which has restored dashboard services,” signaling a return to normal for the affected websites.

Despite the resolution, the incident, which follows recent, separate outages at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, once again underscored the fragile dependence major companies have on a small number of infrastructure providers.

Experts argue that companies have few viable alternatives to these platforms, increasing the urgency for more resilient network design.

For latest tech stories go to TechDigest.tv