In a significant digital disruption on Tuesday, Cloudflare — one of the world’s largest internet infrastructure providers — experienced a widespread outage that crippled access to major platforms, including ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), Canva, Grindr, and several online gaming services.
The outage triggered a flood of user complaints across multiple countries, with many reporting 500 errors, inaccessible dashboards, and API failures. The issue brought large portions of the web to a standstill, given Cloudflare’s dominant role in global internet traffic management.
Cloudflare Confirms Internal Service Degradation
Cloudflare acknowledged the disruption early Tuesday on its official status page. The company stated it was investigating an issue affecting numerous customers, initially hinting at internal service degradation beginning around 6:40 am ET.
While engineers deployed a fix later in the morning, Cloudflare admitted that some customers may continue to face service interruptions as recovery efforts proceed. The company also noted that scheduled maintenance was underway at its Santiago (SCL) data center, though it remains unclear whether this contributed to the problem.
“We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11.20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors,” Cloudflare said in an emailed statement. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
Thousands Affected Worldwide
The outage had a widespread ripple effect across major digital platforms. According to Downdetector, user-reported problems with Cloudflare surged to nearly 5,000 at peak, before dropping to around 600 by 8 am ET as systems began recovering.
Because Downdetector relies on user-submitted reports, the real number of affected users is likely higher.
Platforms such as ChatGPT and X, which heavily rely on Cloudflare’s infrastructure, were among the most disrupted. OpenAI and X have not yet issued public statements regarding the incident.
A String of Recent Tech Outages
This disruption adds to a series of recent global service outages. Just last month, Microsoft Azure experienced downtime, and earlier in October, a massive Amazon AWS outage caused widespread instability across major apps including Snapchat and Reddit.
The growing frequency of such outages underscores the world’s deepening dependence on a handful of global cloud and internet infrastructure providers — and the vulnerabilities that come with it.