There are certain inevitabilities in life: death, taxes, and having to eat crow on the internet. The infrastructure service Cloudflare experienced massive outages on Tuesday morning. This disruption cut off access to a number of popular platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, and Spotify. The outage also impacted Elon Musk’s X platform. This incident occurred just one month after the CEO publicly commented on a widespread AWS outage, which had affected the encrypted messaging service Signal. At that time, Musk wrote on X that messages on its platform are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange dependencies, stating he could not read user messages even under duress.
Signal President Meredith Whittaker used the Cloudflare outage as an opportunity to discuss a larger issue. She explained the problem of having so much of the internet reliant on just a few infrastructure services like Cloudflare and AWS. She reframed the question from why a specific service uses a particular provider to a more fundamental one. She urged people to consider the infrastructural needs of any global, real-time, mass communication platform and to ask how the internet reached a point where there are no realistic alternatives to the major cloud providers.
Cloudflare posted an update on its status page confirming the issue had been identified and that a fix was being implemented. At the time of publication, service had not been fully restored for all Cloudflare customers. However, users may have noticed some platforms beginning to come back online. This story is still developing.