Cloudflare Experiences Major Outage Affecting Key Websites
The American multinational web infrastructure and cybersecurity company, Cloudflare, recently suffered a significant global outage that rendered several major websites inoperable for approximately four hours. Affected sites included social media platform X, design tool Canva, and AI service ChatGPT.
Cloudflare acknowledged the issues at 12:48 p.m. (CET), stating it was actively investigating the incident. Reports from Downdetector, a platform that tracks online service interruptions, indicated that problems started around 12:30 p.m., peaking at 1:00 p.m. While service gradually improved by 1:15 p.m., interruptions persisted for many users.
In a statement issued at 1:20 p.m., Cloudflare noted, “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to experience more errors than usual as we continue to work to resolve the situation.” Eventually, the company announced the incident was resolved by 4:00 p.m., although ongoing issues lingered for some users even after that time.
Impact on Various Sectors
The outage significantly affected multiple sectors, with generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools experiencing widespread failures. OpenAI's ChatGPT was one of the first to go offline, followed by competitors including Claude from Anthropic, Perplexity, and Chinese platform DeepSeek. Notably, Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot managed to remain functional during the chaos.
In addition to AI services, popular video games like League of Legends and Valorant faced disruptions. Issues also cropped up on Blizzard's online gaming platform, Battlenet. Furthermore, some banking services reported problems related to Cloudflare's outage.
Cloudflare's Role in Internet Infrastructure
Cloudflare operates as a crucial intermediary between content providers and websites, offering a robust content distribution network (CDN) to clients worldwide. Given its extensive portfolio of services, failures within Cloudflare's systems can have immediate repercussions across numerous online platforms.
This incident comes on the heels of outages from other major cloud service providers, including AWS and Azure, highlighting vulnerabilities in global internet infrastructure that rely heavily on a few dominant entities.
While Cloudflare has not disclosed the exact cause of the failure, there is speculation within the industry about a potential issue related to planned updates. Diego Suárez, Chief Technology Officer of Transparent Edge, noted that the incident might be tied to several scheduled updates in key regions such as Tahiti, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Santiago de Chile.
Eusebio Nieva, Technical Director of Check Point for Spain and Portugal, emphasized that the pattern of outages associated with large platforms like Cloudflare, AWS, and Azure reveals both the efficiency and risks of relying on such expansive systems. “The downside is clear: when a platform of this size fails, the impact spreads widely and quickly, affecting everyone simultaneously,” he stated.
