A major outage at Cloudflare, a US-based internet infrastructure company, caused widespread disruption on Tuesday, with users unable to access many websites and services. The issue, which began at 11:48 AM London time, affected sites including X and OpenAI, according to Downdetector.
Cloudflare provides services such as DDoS protection and content delivery to millions of websites. The company identified the root cause as a configuration file that grew too large, triggering a crash in its traffic management system. A fix was implemented by 2:48 PM, and services were gradually restored.
Professor Alan Woodward of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security described Cloudflare as 'the biggest company you’ve never heard of' and a 'gatekeeper' for internet traffic. He noted that the incident highlights the fragility of relying on a small number of infrastructure providers.
A Cloudflare spokesperson apologised and stated there was no evidence of malicious activity. The outage follows a similar disruption at Amazon Web Services less than a month ago, underscoring the vulnerability of the internet's core infrastructure.
