Cloudflare Outage Temporarily Cripples Major Platforms, Disrupts X, Spotify, and ChatGPT
A major outage at Cloudflare early Tuesday morning sent shockwaves through the internet, bringing down or disrupting access to some of the web’s most widely used platforms—including X (formerly Twitter), Spotify, and ChatGPT.
The issue began around 6:00 a.m. ET, when users across the globe started reporting error messages, sluggish loading times, and complete service interruptions. According to DownDetector, reports of outages surged quickly, with over 10,000 X users impacted at the peak. OpenAI’s ChatGPT saw more than 1,800 reports during the same window, while other major services like Amazon, Shopify, Google, DoorDash, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom also reported intermittent issues.
The source of the chaos: Cloudflare.
The San Francisco-based company serves as a backbone of the modern internet—providing website security, content delivery network (CDN) services, and DDoS protection to millions of sites and apps worldwide. So when Cloudflare stumbles, the entire digital ecosystem feels the tremors.
In a public update, Cloudflare confirmed that its own support portal was experiencing issues and that customers could expect trouble accessing or managing support cases. However, live chat and emergency lines for enterprise clients remained operational.
“We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem,” the company said in an initial post.
After several hours of rolling disruptions, Cloudflare issued another message: “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”
Despite that assurance, the company noted that some residual issues may linger, and users might still see sporadic outages or slow loading.
The incident is yet another reminder of how deeply reliant the global internet has become on a handful of tech infrastructure providers. Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services, and a few others handle much of the behind-the-scenes work that keeps the modern internet functioning—and when just one has a hiccup, the impact is immediate and widespread.
While no cybersecurity breaches have been reported in connection to the outage, the event underscores the importance of redundancy and contingency planning across the digital economy.
As of midday Tuesday, most affected platforms were back online and running normally. But for millions of users who woke up to error messages and broken apps, it was a stark reminder: the internet isn’t quite as bulletproof as it seems.