Major Internet Disruption as Cloudflare Suffers Global Outage
A significant disruption hit the global internet on Tuesday when Cloudflare, a crucial but typically invisible component of web infrastructure, experienced a major outage. The incident caused error messages to appear across countless websites, leaving users unable to access numerous online services.
Timeline and Impact of the Service Failure
The problems began at 11.20am GMT when Cloudflare detected a sharp and unusual spike in traffic targeting one of its core services. This anomalous activity resulted in elevated error rates across multiple services within Cloudflare's network. While the company confirmed that most traffic continued to flow normally, a significant portion of requests passing through its systems encountered failures.
According to monitoring service Downdetector, major platforms including X and OpenAI experienced increased outages coinciding with Cloudflare's technical difficulties. The ripple effect also impacted site administrators, many of whom found themselves locked out of their performance dashboards and unable to manage their web properties.
Ongoing Investigation and Recovery Efforts
In an official statement, a Cloudflare spokesperson confirmed the company had all hands on deck to restore normal service. By 12.21pm GMT, the company reported seeing services beginning to recover, though warning customers they might continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates during ongoing remediation efforts.
The root cause of the unusual traffic spike that triggered the widespread outage remains unidentified. Cloudflare has prioritised restoring service stability before turning its full attention to investigating what prompted the anomalous network activity. The company continues to provide updates as its technical teams work to fully resolve the incident.
