A massive outage linked to Cloudflare disrupted major online platforms on Monday, leaving thousands of users unable to access services such as X, Canva, OpenAI products, Spotify and more. Reports began flooding in around 11 AM, with Downdetector logging over 7,000 complaints by early evening.
Cloudflare Confirms Widespread 500 Errors
Cloudflare, a key internet infrastructure provider known for its CDN and DNS services, acknowledged the issue and confirmed that customers were facing “widespread 500 errors.” The disruption also affected the Cloudflare Dashboard and API, making it difficult for clients to monitor or manage their systems.
The company stated: “We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem,” adding that further updates would follow.
The outage was so extensive that even Downdetector—used by millions to track outages—went down temporarily because it relies on Cloudflare’s network.
Major Platforms Impacted
Multiple well-known platforms experienced failures, including:
- OpenAI’s ChatGPT
- Perplexity
- Spotify
- Gemini
- X (formerly Twitter)
Once Downdetector recovered, the data revealed a major spike in error reports across many of these services.
Outage Follows Recent AWS Breakdown
This Cloudflare failure came less than a month after a major outage at Amazon Web Services that disrupted Reddit, Snapchat, Fortnite and other major platforms. The repeated incidents have reopened concerns about the risks of relying heavily on a few large companies for global internet infrastructure.
Cloudflare Says Issue Is Fixed and Monitored
Cloudflare later announced that the problem had been resolved. Around 9:45 AM ET, the company said a fix had been deployed and services were returning to normal.
In a statement, Cloudflare said: “We detected a surge in atypical traffic directed to one of Cloudflare’s services starting at 11:20 UTC. This resulted in some traffic traversing Cloudflare’s network encountering errors.”
The company added: “We have mobilized all resources to ensure that all traffic is processed without errors.”
No Signs of Cyberattack, Cloudflare Confirms
Cloudflare stated that there was no evidence the outage was caused by a cyberattack or malicious activity.
A spokesperson said: “Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologize to our customers and the internet in general for letting you down today.”
Root Cause: Oversized Configuration File
Cloudflare reported that the “root cause” was an automatically generated configuration file meant to manage threat traffic. The file became larger than expected, leading to a system crash in the software responsible for handling network traffic.
The company also noted it detected a “spike in unusual traffic” around 5:20 AM ET.
What Else Was Affected?
- NJ Transit’s digital tools experienced interruptions.
- OpenAI confirmed that ChatGPT and its Sora video tool fully recovered after issues tied to a “third-party service provider.”
- Users on X, ChatGPT and League of Legends reported connectivity problems during the outage window.
