By A significant Cloudflare outage briefly knocked large portions of the internet offline, leaving users unable to access major sites like X and Letterboxd. The issue began early this afternoon and swiftly affected numerous platforms that rely on Cloudflare’s services to stay online.
Cloudflare outage disrupts X, ChatGPT, and more
On Friday, several major websites stopped functioning after a technical fault at Cloudflare caused widespread connectivity issues. Users visiting sites like X (formerly Twitter) and the film review platform Letterboxd encountered error messages indicating that Cloudflare’s network couldn’t load their pages. Some users also reported issues accessing OpenAI platforms such as ChatGPT, according to data from Downdetector.
Why Cloudflare matters
Cloudflare underpins a massive portion of today’s internet, offering services ranging from content delivery and website security to traffic management during high-demand or cyberattack scenarios. When its systems go down, the consequences extend well beyond a single website—affecting many unrelated services at once. This outage echoed last month’s AWS incident in scale and impact.
Cloudflare quickly acknowledged the problem, stating it was “aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers,” but provided no details about the cause or a repair timeline. The disruptions began around 11:30 a.m. UK time. While some pages eventually loaded after refreshing, many users continued to face an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network.”
Even Downdetector, the service that tracks online outages, was temporarily inaccessible due to its reliance on Cloudflare. Once it came back online, it recorded a surge in reports about issues with X, Spotify, and others.
Cloudflare issued a second update 15 minutes later saying the investigation was ongoing, but still offered no insight into the root cause. With major parts of the internet depending on Cloudflare to function, this outage serves as another reminder of the web’s growing reliance on a handful of critical infrastructure providers.
