A significant Cloudflare outage on Tuesday caused waves of error messages across the internet, interrupting access to major platforms and leaving millions of users unable to reach certain websites. The US-based company—responsible for protecting and accelerating traffic for millions of sites—reported an unexplained surge in unusual traffic that triggered cascading service issues.
According to outage tracker Downdetector, platforms such as X and OpenAI experienced elevated disruptions during the same window as Cloudflare’s malfunction. Some website owners were also unable to access their performance dashboards, intensifying concerns about the scale of the incident.
As of 12:21 p.m. GMT, Cloudflare said that services were beginning to recover, though users might still encounter higher-than-normal error rates while remediation continued. “We are continuing to investigate this issue,” the company stated in a follow-up update.
Unusual Traffic Surge Under Investigation
A Cloudflare spokesperson confirmed that engineers detected a spike in abnormal traffic beginning at 11:20 a.m. This surge caused intermittent errors for some traffic crossing the network. While most services remained functional, “elevated errors” were reported across multiple systems.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike,” the spokesperson said. “We are all hands on deck to ensure traffic is served without errors before shifting to uncovering the root cause.”
Cloudflare had planned maintenance on several datacenters—including those in Tahiti, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Santiago—though it remains unclear whether this coincided with or contributed to the outage.
Impact on Encryption Tools and Global Users
In an attempt to stabilize its systems, Cloudflare temporarily disabled its Warp encryption service in London, warning that users relying on Warp in the region would be unable to connect.
Professor Alan Woodward of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security emphasized how critical Cloudflare is to the internet’s infrastructure, describing it as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of.” The firm’s role as a gatekeeper includes filtering malicious traffic, providing DDoS defenses, and verifying whether users are legitimate humans.
A Reminder of the Internet’s Fragile Backbone
The outage comes just weeks after an Amazon Web Services disruption that knocked thousands of sites offline—further highlighting how heavily the digital world relies on a small number of infrastructure giants.
“We’re seeing how few of these companies there are in the infrastructure of the internet,” Woodward noted. “When one of them fails, it becomes really obvious very quickly.”
While the cause of the Cloudflare outage remains undetermined, experts believe a cyberattack is unlikely due to the company’s distributed architecture and lack of a single point of failure.
Cloudflare continues to work toward full restoration as investigators analyze the unusual traffic surge that set off the chain reaction.
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