The company provides web security, speed, and routing services for millions of sites, so when Cloudflare goes down, anything that relies on it cannot load, a failure that ripples across a huge portion of the internet.
Issues hit Cloudflare around 6:48am ET on Tuesday.
Downdetector, which tracks online outages, shows the Cloudflare glitch has affected X, Spotify, OpenAI, Uber, Grindr and many others.
Cloudflare has acknowledged the issue, saying it is experiencing an internal service degradation that may intermittently impact some services.
The company said it is focused on restoring service and will provide updates as the fix rolls out.
Cloudflare later confirmed it had identified the problem and begun implementing a solution.
‘We are continuing to work towards restoring other services,’ the company shared at 8:13am ET.
Downdetector, a site that monitors online outages, shows the Cloudflare glitch has affected X, Spotify, OpenAI, Uber and the dating site Grindr, along with many others
Cloudflare runs a huge network of servers spread across more than 330 cities in over 120 countries.
These servers help websites load faster, stay secure and handle traffic smoothly.
Its system is extremely powerful, handling massive amounts of data and connecting to more than 13,000 internet networks, including the biggest internet providers, cloud services, and major companies around the world.
The outage stems from the Cloudflare Global Network, a distributed network of data centres that connects users to websites and applications, making them faster and more secure.
Downdetector received tens of thousands of reports since the outage began, with impacted users experiencing issues with server connections, websites and hosting.
Many users have reported error messages when clicking links on the web, with alerts showing an ‘Internal server error’ and blaming the issue on a local Cloudflare data centre.
Graeme Stuart, head of the public sector at Check Point, a cybersecurity firm credited with creating the first firewall, said: ‘Cloudflare going down today sits in the same pattern we saw with the recent AWS and Azure outages.
‘These platforms are vast, efficient and used by almost every part of modern life.’
Many users have reported error messages when clicking links on the web, with alerts showing an ‘Internal server error’ and blaming the issue on a local Cloudflare data center
Millions of users (stock) are unable to access their favorite websites Tuesday morning
‘When a platform of this size slips, the impact spreads far and fast and everyone feels it at once.’
Stuart explained to Sky News that the reported outages did not occur because each organization failed on its own, but because ‘a single layer they all rely on stopped responding.’
‘Many organisations still run everything through one route with no meaningful backup. When that route fails, there is no fallback. That is the weakness we keep seeing play out,’ he said.
‘The internet was meant to be resilient through distribution, yet we have ended up concentrating huge amounts of global traffic into a handful of cloud providers.’
