Cloudflare Outage Sends Shockwaves Across The Internet, Disrupting X, ChatGPT, Letterboxd, And Multiple Popular Online Services

 

A massive disruption at Cloudflare is sweeping across the internet, knocking dozens of major websites offline and triggering internal server errors for countless users. Platforms relying on Cloudflare’s infrastructure, including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, Letterboxd and more, were hit hard, with visitors greeted by messages citing “an internal server error on Cloudflare’s network.”

Cloudflare acknowledged the incident, confirming it was “aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers.” Engineers are working to restore normal service, but said there may still be elevated error rates as they continue to monitor.

The outage reportedly began early on Tuesday morning, when a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services caused widespread 500 errors throughout its network. By mid-morning, some sites briefly recovered, only to suffer further disruptions soon after.

For users, the experience was frustratingly consistent: screens went blank, pages refused to load, and error messages urging interaction with Cloudflare’s challenge service appeared, even though the infrastructure itself was failing, not the user’s browser. The confusing prompt, “please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed,” is normally seen when a firewall or ad-blocker interferes with verification scripts, but this time faulty Cloudflare servers were to blame.

OpenAI reported that its API clients experienced timeouts as a result of the outage, while broader performance degradations affected other corners of the network. Meanwhile, outage-hunting site DownDetector, ironically one of the services hit, registered a sharp spike in reports, amplifying how widespread the problem became.

Cloudflare’s own status page confirmed degraded performance, although by late morning a fix had been “implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved.” The company also noted it would continue to monitor as traffic stabilizes across its network.

Observers have pointed to the event as a sharp reminder of how fragile parts of the internet’s backbone remain. Cloudflare powers a significant slice of the web, from streaming services to essential applications, meaning its failures can reverberate globally.

This outage comes on the heels of another major incident less than a month ago, when Amazon Web Services suffered its own disruption that took many internet services offline. That prior failure underlines growing concerns: with a few infrastructure giants controlling much of the digital world, a single glitch can ripple across countless platforms.

Cloudflare says it is conducting a full investigation into the root cause of the traffic spike but has not yet confirmed whether the incident was malicious or accidental. Until then, users and companies alike are left to ponder just how much of the online world depends on a single network gatekeeper.