It affected several high-profile websites, including X and ChatGPT, following a spike in abnormal traffic routed through Cloudflare — one of the world’s largest internet infrastructure providers.
The issue began around 6:20 a.m. and quickly triggered error messages across platforms, with thousands of users reporting outages to Downdetector, which itself was impacted.
Cloudflare, which supports roughly 20% of global websites, acknowledged the disruption and began remediation efforts, noting that while services were recovering, elevated error rates could persist.
The outage highlights the growing dependence on centralized infrastructure providers like Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure — a reliance that experts warn creates potential single points of failure across the internet.
Sites affected displayed various error messages, including internal server notices and prompts to unblock Cloudflare challenges.
At the time of posting 9:50amET the disruption was beginning to alleviate itself.
Written by: M. Leblanc