Global Internet Outage as Cloudflare Experiences Prolonged Glitch

•X, ChatGPT, Facebook, Spotify, Shopify, other sites affected

Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja

Internet infrastructure company, Cloudflare, was yesterday hit by an outage that knocked several major websites and services offline for several hours.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, e-commerce platform Shopify, music streaming platform, Spotify, Facebook and Elon Musk’s social media platform X were among the sites impacted by the Cloudflare issues.

A Cloudflare spokesperson said the company had identified the “root cause” of the outage, noting there’s no evidence it was caused by an attack or malicious activity.

However, many sites came back online within a few hours. In an update to its status page, Cloudflare said it had implemented a fix to resolve the outage, though it noted some users may still experience issues accessing its online dashboard.

“We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” the company added.

Job search engine Indeed, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, President Donald Trump’s Truth Social and X were also among the sites impacted by the Cloudflare issues, according to Downdetector, which itself could not be accessed briefly for some users. Some of New Jersey Transit’s digital services were brought down by the outage.

OpenAI’s status page indicated ChatGPT and its Sora short-form video app were fully recovered after they experienced issues due to a “third-party service provider.”

The Cloudflare spokesperson said the “root cause” of the outage was an automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic that “grew beyond an expected size of entries,” which triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for several of its services. The company said it began to observe a “spike in unusual traffic” around 5:20 a.m. ET.

There’s no evidence that the outage was a result of an attack or caused by malicious activity, the spokesperson added.

“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” the spokesperson said. “We apologise to our customers and the internet general for letting you down today.”

Cloudflare’s software is used by many businesses worldwide, helping to manage and secure traffic for about 20 per cent of the web. Among the services it provides are that it guards against distributed denial of service attacks, which are when malicious actors attempt to overload a website’s system with so many traffic requests that it can’t function. Shares of Cloudflare slid more than 4 per cent, a CNBC report said.

The issue comes less than a month after Amazon Web Services suffered a daylong disruption that took down numerous online services, followed by a global outage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud and 365 services.

In July 2024, a faulty software upgrade by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused a widespread outage that temporarily halted flights, impacted financial services and pushed hospitals to delay procedures.