A major outage at Cloudflare, one of the world’s most critical Internet infrastructure providers, caused widespread disruptions on Tuesday, affecting leading platforms including ChatGPT, social media service X, transit systems, and numerous other online services across the globe.
The company reported on its status page that it had identified a technical issue impacting multiple customers, triggering a surge of 500 errors and causing the Cloudflare Dashboard and API to become unresponsive.
The outage quickly rippled across the Internet, interrupting access to popular services that rely on Cloudflare for network stability and security, according to Arab News.
As engineers worked to contain the problem, Cloudflare temporarily disabled certain services for users in the United Kingdom to facilitate recovery efforts.
By late Tuesday, the company said it had restored functionality for Cloudflare Access and WARP, two of its key services, noting that error levels had returned to normal. WARP access in London was also re-enabled.
“We are continuing to work toward restoring other services,” Cloudflare said in an update, reassuring customers that additional fixes were underway.
Cloudflare plays a central role in maintaining the backbone of the Internet by offering network performance optimization and cybersecurity solutions used by service providers worldwide. Because so many platforms depend on its systems, even brief technical failures can have far-reaching effects.
Cybersecurity specialists have long cautioned that the Internet’s increasing dependence on a small number of major infrastructure companies poses significant risks.
Tuesday’s outage served as a stark reminder of how fragile global connectivity can be when key elements of the digital ecosystem experience failure.
