Internet infrastructure giant **Cloudflare** experienced a significant global outage on Tuesday, temporarily knocking several major websites and online services offline for users worldwide. The disruption, which impacted a wide array of platforms—from social media to e-commerce and AI services—underscores the critical role Cloudflare plays in maintaining internet stability.
Cloudflare confirmed that the issue was resolved within a few hours, though shares of the company still slid by more than **2%** following the incident.
The Impact: Major Websites Go Dark
The outage severely affected numerous high-traffic services, demonstrating the interconnectedness of modern web infrastructure:
- **Social Media & AI:** **Elon Musk’s X** (formerly Twitter), **Truth Social**, **ChatGPT**, Anthropic’s **Claude** chatbot, and Sora were all impacted.
- **E-commerce & Public Services:** E-commerce platform **Shopify**, job search engine **Indeed**, and some of **NJ Transit’s** digital operations were also affected.
OpenAI confirmed that its services had fully recovered after experiencing issues traced back to a “third-party service provider” (Cloudflare).
Root Cause: A Configuration File Glitch
Cloudflare issued an apology, stating that the outage was an internal error and **not the result of a cyberattack or malicious activity**.
The company confirmed the “root cause” was a technical error related to managing high-volume traffic:
“The root cause of the outage was an automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic that **grew beyond an expected size of entries**,” the spokesperson explained. This oversized file triggered a crash in the software system responsible for handling traffic across several key Cloudflare services.
The company’s software is crucial for managing and securing traffic for approximately **20% of the world’s websites**, making any failure a major global event.
The Problem of Centralized Infrastructure
This incident follows a string of high-profile cloud and infrastructure disruptions in recent months, including outages at **Amazon Web Services (AWS)** and **Microsoft Azure/365**. The failures highlight how relying on a few dominant infrastructure providers means a single point of failure can instantaneously impact critical global services, leading to both economic and operational consequences worldwide.
“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” the spokesperson added. “We apologize to our customers and the internet in general for letting you down today.”
