A major Cloudflare outage on Tuesday temporarily knocked several of the world’s most-used websites and online services offline, including ChatGPT, X, Shopify, Indeed, Truth Social, and parts of NJ Transit. The outage lasted several hours before Cloudflare issued a fix and began restoring normal operations.
Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure giant that powers and protects about 20% of all websites, confirmed that the disruption began after the company detected a “spike in unusual traffic” around 6:20 a.m. ET.
⚠️ What Exactly Happened?
Cloudflare reported that an unexpected surge of abnormal traffic affected one of its core services, causing “widespread 500 errors” across websites routed through its network.
Even Cloudflare’s own dashboard and API were briefly inaccessible.
Large portions of the internet began failing around 6 a.m. ET, with users reporting issues on Downdetector—which itself struggled to stay online during the outage.
By 8:10 a.m., Cloudflare said it had identified the root issue.
By 9:42 a.m., the company deployed a fix and announced that services were stabilizing.
“We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,”
Cloudflare said.
🌐 Who Was Affected?
According to outage trackers and user reports, the disruption impacted a wide range of platforms:
- OpenAI (ChatGPT & Sora video app)
- X (formerly Twitter)
- Shopify
- Indeed
- Anthropic’s Claude
- Truth Social
- NJ Transit services
- Multiple e-commerce and enterprise websites
OpenAI confirmed its systems were affected due to issues with a third-party service provider, referencing Cloudflare.
Shares of Cloudflare fell more than 3% after the news broke.
🧱 What Is Cloudflare—and Why Does This Matter?
Cloudflare is one of the hidden pillars of the modern internet.
Most people know it from “I am not a robot” CAPTCHA pages, but its role is far bigger:
Cloudflare provides:
- Website security
- DDoS attack protection
- Traffic management
- Content delivery
- API reliability
- Performance optimization
Because of its infrastructure footprint, any glitch in Cloudflare’s systems can cause internet-wide disruptions.
🕵️ Cause Still Unknown
Cloudflare noted that the spike in unusual traffic triggered the disruption but said the cause remains under investigation.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck,”
a company spokesperson said.
There is no evidence yet of a cyberattack or targeted breach.
📉 A Pattern of Recent Outages
This incident is the latest in a series of infrastructure-related failures affecting the global internet in recent months.
Recent major outages include:
- June 2024: Cloudflare outage took down Twitch, Etsy, Discord, Google services.
- October 2024: Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage disrupted Slack, Snapchat, and other major apps for 15+ hours.
- Microsoft Azure & 365 also experienced a global outage less than a month ago.
- July 2024: A flawed CrowdStrike software update caused airline cancellations, hospital delays, and financial service outages worldwide.
Cloudflare’s latest outage reinforces how interconnected—and vulnerable—the internet’s backbone infrastructure can be.
