A significant outage at Cloudflare’s global network caused sweeping disruptions across the internet, affecting major platforms including X (formerly known as Twitter) and ChatGPT.
According to Cloudflare’s status page, the issue began in the early hours of Tuesday and triggered HTTP 500 error messages that impacted its dashboard and API, pointing to internal infrastructure failure rather than an isolated server problem.
Multiple services experienced outages: X suffered intermittent availability, the outage-tracking site Downdetector reported over 11,000 problem reports at its peak, and some news outlets were completely unreachable.
The incident may stem from a scheduled maintenance event Cloudflare had begun around 5 a.m. ET, suggesting the disruption resulted from an internal change rather than an external attack.
As part of its remediation efforts, Cloudflare disabled its consumer-privacy tool “WARP” in the London region, which encrypts user traffic but does not mask IP addresses.
The outage highlights how much of the internet infrastructure depends on a small number of large providers. Previous major incidents — such as a high-profile Amazon Web Services failure traced to a mis-configured database API update in October — show that even foundational services like DNS can become points of widespread failure.
