Popular services such as X and ChatGPT experienced disruptions Tuesday morning because of issues with the platform running their websites.
Parts of the internet, including X and the online game “League of Legends,” appeared to simply stop functioning Tuesday morning for several hours because of a technical problem with Cloudflare.
Cloudflare is an internet infrastructure platform that underpins much of the internet, including tools to protect websites from cyberattacks and to maintain operations under heavy traffic.
According to DownDetector.com, which tracks internet outages, the problems began around 6 a.m. Eastern. X (formerly Twitter), Letterboxd, online game League of Legends and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI all experienced a spike in errors over the next hour.
Others experiencing issues included Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, Moody’s and NJ Transit. Moody’s website displayed an Error Code 500 and instructed individuals to visit Cloudflare’s website for more information.
Around 6:45 a.m. Eastern, Cloudflare posted a message indicating it was investigating the issue.
“Investigating – Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing,” the message read.
A follow-up approximately 15 minutes later stated the company was continuing to investigate the issue.
Around 7:20 a.m., the company indicated services were coming back online.
“We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts,” the message read.
By 7:30 a.m., many of the issues appeared to have resolved, at least for some users. Sites like X were accessible again, and DownDetector indicated a drop in the amount of errors reported.
Some users continued experiencing issues even after Cloudflare stated services were coming back online. By around 8 a.m., the number of errors had levelled off, but did not appear to be falling in the way they traditionally do when a service disruption is fixed.
By 8:10 a.m., Cloudflare indicated it had identified an issue and was working on a fix to bring all services back online again.
Just before 9:45 a.m., the company stated it had found the cause of the issue and had fixed it.
“A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”
DownDetector showed error reports declining across the affected websites around the time of the announcement.
The outage was not the first time in recent months that Cloudflare issues have disrupted the internet. Large portions of the internet experienced downtime in June after a Cloudflare disruption, affecting Twitch, Etsy, Discord and Google.
In October, a separate incident involving Amazon Web Services, another core pillar of the internet, knocked out service to major websites and apps for over half a day. For over 15 hours, Slack, Snapchat and other well-known tools were offline whilst their underlying infrastructure was repaired.
The Tuesday morning Cloudflare outage that disrupted major websites and services for several hours illustrates the profound vulnerability created when vast portions of internet infrastructure depend on a small number of centralised platforms, where single points of failure can cascade into widespread service disruptions affecting millions of users and thousands of businesses simultaneously.
Cloudflare’s role as internet infrastructure provider positions the company as invisible intermediary between users and the websites they visit, providing services including content delivery networks that cache website content closer to users for faster loading, DDoS protection that filters malicious traffic attempting to overwhelm websites, and security services that protect against various cyberattacks. This intermediary position means Cloudflare technical problems directly impact all customer websites regardless of those sites’ own infrastructure health.
The Error Code 500 displayed on affected websites represents a generic “Internal Server Error” message indicating server-side problems preventing request fulfilment. For end users, these errors create frustration and confusion as familiar websites suddenly become inaccessible without clear explanation of whether problems originate with their own internet connections, the websites themselves, or intermediary infrastructure like Cloudflare.
