A major outage at Cloudflare, a key internet infrastructure provider, caused widespread disruption to websites including X, ChatGPT, and Letterboxd on Tuesday. Users attempting to access these sites encountered error messages indicating an internal server error on Cloudflare's network.
Cloudflare acknowledged the issue in a statement, saying it was investigating a problem that potentially impacted multiple customers. The company later confirmed that services were operating normally again, though engineering teams continued to monitor the platform.
The outage, which began around 14:30 UTC, affected Cloudflare's control plane—the dashboard and APIs used by customers to configure services. Dane Knecht, Cloudflare's chief technology officer, said the impact on traffic was resolved first, but full restoration of the control plane took additional time.
Cybersecurity experts noted the rarity of such a global outage. Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey, said it was surprising given that networks are designed to avoid single points of failure. Lee Skillen, CTO of Cloudsmith, warned that as systems become more interconnected, similar incidents are inevitable.
Cloudflare had scheduled maintenance for its Santiago data centre on the same day, but it remains unclear if this was related. The company said no configuration changes were being made during the investigation.
