A widespread Cloudflare outage on Tuesday morning created a chain reaction across the internet, knocking out access to services like ChatGPT, X, Canva, League of Legends, and many other sites. The disruption started shortly after Cloudflare detected an unexpected surge of traffic hitting one of its services and pushing parts of its network into failure.
Cloudflare said engineers began investigating around 6:40 a.m. ET after spotting unusual traffic directed at one of its systems. The spike triggered elevated error rates, including 500-level failures, as requests struggled to move across its infrastructure. Many users saw pages stall or encountered messages asking them to unblock a Cloudflare challenges page.
The outage swept across platforms that rely on Cloudflare for security, routing, and content delivery. Social networks, creative tools, productivity apps, and gaming services all experienced issues at the same time. The scale of the disruption raised questions about how dependent the modern internet is on a small number of infrastructure companies. As David Choffnes, a computer science professor at Northeastern University, put it, “It really highlights how dependent the internet is on a few players.”
This outage also arrived during a month already marked by instability across major cloud providers. Amazon Web Services faced a multiregion service failure earlier in the month that disrupted banking tools, workplace apps, and several AI services. Microsoft Azure experienced its own widespread incident days later when a network routing issue took down authentication services and identity tools for hours. With Cloudflare now joining that list, three of the largest cloud and internet-infrastructure companies have all suffered high-visibility outages within a span of weeks. The clustered timing has renewed concerns about how vulnerable the internet becomes when so much daily activity depends on a handful of providers.
By mid-morning, Cloudflare said it had implemented a fix and believed traffic had returned to normal. Engineers continued to monitor for lingering instability as systems synced across the network. Cloudflare plans to release a full post-incident analysis explaining the root cause and the steps it will take to strengthen resilience.
The outage served as another reminder of the growing centralization in internet infrastructure. Cloudflare supports a large share of global traffic, and even a brief failure can ripple across the web. As outages continue to stack up across major cloud providers, businesses are reassessing redundancy strategies and the risks of relying on limited sources for routing, authentication, and compute power.
Cloudflare is expected to publish additional details once its internal review is complete. Customers and developers will watch closely for improvements in routing diversity, detection speed, and safeguards designed to prevent similar disruptions.
