On Tuesday morning, a significant portion of the internet experienced outages or performance issues. Major services like ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify, and X were affected due to a problem at the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare.
Cloudflare reported on its status page around 8 am ET that it had identified the issues and was implementing a fix. In less than two hours, the company announced that a fix had been implemented and the incident was believed to be resolved. They continued to monitor their systems to ensure all services returned to normal.
Around the same time, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, Dane Knecht, provided an explanation in a public post. He stated that a latent bug was responsible for the disruption. He explained that this previously undetected bug, which had not caused a failure during testing, began to crash following a routine configuration change. This failure cascaded into a broad degradation of the company’s network and other services. Knecht confirmed this was not an attack.
Knecht apologized, saying Cloudflare had failed its customers and the broader internet with the outage. He promised the company was already taking steps to prevent a recurrence and acknowledged the incident caused real pain. He also committed to providing a more in-depth breakdown of the events in the coming hours.
The company later noted on its status page that some customers might still be experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard. Cloudflare said it was working on a fix for this and continued to monitor for any further problems.
Cloudflare’s massive outage occurred less than a month after a similar outage at Amazon Web Services. This event serves as another stark reminder that a large portion of the web depends on a small number of companies. When these giants experience issues, the internet at large can begin to crumble.
According to one estimate, Cloudflare is used by 20 percent of all websites. The company states it has data centers in 330 cities and that 13,000 networks directly connect to its infrastructure, including every major internet service provider, cloud provider, and enterprise. One of Cloudflare’s primary services is protecting customers from Distributed Denial of Service attacks, which are designed to knock websites offline. This fact made Tuesday’s widespread outages somewhat ironic.