A major outage at Cloudflare caused a ripple effect across many popular websites on Tuesday morning. Starting around 5:20 a.m. EST, users found themselves unable to access services like ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), Spotify, Uber, and more. Some websites displayed messages asking users to unblock a Cloudflare security domain, while others simply failed to load or experienced major slowdowns.

Cloudflare, a web security and infrastructure provider for thousands of platforms globally, traced the issue to a sudden and significant increase in unusual traffic. By mid-morning, engineers had implemented a fix and were actively monitoring systems, though the root cause remained undetermined.

The event revealed how quickly disruptions to core internet infrastructure can impact popular services, even outage tracking websites themselves.

Why It Matters: Cloudflare’s outage brought down key parts of the internet, showing how dependent many popular websites and services are on just a few underlying infrastructure providers. When one of these providers has a problem, the impact spreads far and fast, affecting people’s ability to perform day-to-day business and personal functions.

• Broad Impact Across Major Services: The outage affected a wide range of platforms used daily by millions of people. Services like ChatGPT, X, Spotify, Uber, Canva, and even Downdetector became unavailable or experienced major disruptions. This meant that core communication and entertainment services were impacted, and the tools people use to monitor and respond to outages were affected at the same time.

• Cloudflare’s Explanation and Fix Timeline: According to statements made to media outlets, Cloudflare engineers noticed the issue early in the morning and quickly determined that a spike in unexpected traffic was to blame. A fix was implemented before 10 a.m. EST, restoring most functionality. However, full remediation and ongoing monitoring continued throughout the day as teams worked to make sure the problem was contained and would not resurface. The company is planning a full investigation into what caused the unusual spike.

• No Clear Cause for the Unusual Traffic: At the time of reporting, Cloudflare had not identified what exactly caused the sharp increase in traffic. The company emphasized that they are focusing first on restoring reliable service and will look into the exact nature and origin of the incident once systems are stabilized. This leaves open the possibility that it could have been due to technical failure or a malicious attempt to disrupt services, although no evidence currently supports any single theory.

• Other Providers Have Recently Faced Similar Issues: This incident follows several other large-scale outages from major cloud providers. Just weeks earlier, an Amazon Web Services failure brought down Snapchat, Fortnite, and Alexa. Microsoft Azure also suffered problems that left Xbox and other systems offline for hours. These events show that interruptions at the infrastructure level can affect many different kinds of companies and apps, even if those apps are not directly related.

• Cloudflare’s Global Internet Role: Founded in 2009, Cloudflare plays a key part in website uptime and security, operating hundreds of data centers across more than 125 countries. Because so many websites rely on its infrastructure for basic operations, even a short-term disruption can lead to wide-ranging service failures across the internet.

Go Deeper -> A massive Cloudflare outage is affecting X, ChatGPT, and even Downdetector – The Verge

What is Cloudflare? Internet service outage affects X, Spotify and ChatGPT – USA Today