Multiple websites and internet services were down on Tuesday after an outage, according to cloud computing firm Cloudflare. Sites including X, Meta’s Facebook and OpenAI’s ChatGPT were affected. Even Downdetector – which tracks global outages – was down. On the company’s status dashboard, Cloudflare said it “is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers”. The outage caused problems in Cloudflare’s online support feature.
“We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts,” the company posted shortly after the initial problem surfaced. The incident once again highlighted the critical role that internet infrastructure providers play—often unnoticed—until something goes wrong.
It’s the latest in a string of cloud, data centre and overall web infrastructure outages affecting various companies that have had a domino effect on websites globally. Those who operate businesses, apps and services that intensely depend on cloud computing stability were quick to react.
Cloudflare, which describes itself as “one of the world’s largest networks,” supports millions of websites and apps. Its tools help digital platforms manage heavy traffic, guard against cyberattacks, and maintain fast, stable performance.
When a provider of this scale suffers an outage, the ripple effects are immediate and global. The Cloudflare disruption follows a similar episode last month involving Amazon Web Services (AWS), another backbone of the global internet. Both incidents underscored how dependent modern online life is on a handful of infrastructure providers that typically remain invisible—until failure brings parts of the internet to a standstill.
