The BareStory
A widespread outage at internet infrastructure company Cloudflare on Tuesday morning caused disruptions for numerous major websites and online services across the globe. Among the platforms affected were the social media site X, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and the internet outage tracker Downdetector.
A Cloudflare spokesperson attributed the hours-long disruption to a technical problem, not a malicious attack. According to the spokesperson, an automatically generated configuration file grew too large, which caused a software system to crash. The company stated it detected a spike in unusual traffic early Tuesday and apologized for the incident. By 9:57 a.m. ET, Cloudflare reported that a fix had been implemented and it was monitoring the situation to ensure a full recovery.
The outage impacted a wide range of platforms. According to the outage tracking site Downdetector, users also reported issues with Shopify, League of Legends, and Donald Trump's Truth Social. In a separate statement, OpenAI's status page indicated its ChatGPT and Sora applications had recovered from issues it attributed to a "third-party service provider." Following the incident, shares of Cloudflare were reported to have declined by more than 2%.
This event followed other recent significant service disruptions at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure. Mehdi Daoudi, the CEO of internet reliability company Catchpoint, stated that such incidents have cascading effects and highlight the fragility of online infrastructure due to a heavy reliance on a small number of providers.
How it may affect me
As a U.S. reader:
• You may have temporarily been unable to access major websites and online services, including X, ChatGPT, and Shopify, disrupting communication, work, and e-commerce activities.
• Businesses using platforms like Shopify may have experienced temporary sales losses, highlighting a financial risk for companies that depend on these centralized internet services.
• The outage indicates that future widespread internet disruptions remain a risk, as much of the internet's infrastructure depends on a small number of large companies.
