A major global outage at Cloudflare, one of the internet's most critical infrastructure providers, caused widespread chaos today, abruptly knocking X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, and hundreds of other major platforms offline for millions of users worldwide.
🌐 The Impact: Who Was Hit?
The disruption, linked to a network configuration issue at Cloudflare's core, exposed the reliance of the modern web on a few key companies. Reports of "500 Internal Server Error" and "Connection timed out" spiked globally, hitting key services including:
Social Media: X (Twitter) and Snapchat.
AI Giants: ChatGPT (OpenAI), Perplexity, and Gemini.
Creative Tools: Canva.
Streaming & Gaming: Spotify and League of Legends.
E-commerce and various other SaaS platforms.
In a stark demonstration of the outage's severity, even Downdetector, the website users rely on to report outages, struggled to remain online as it uses Cloudflare's services.
⚙️ What Happened?
Cloudflare, which provides content delivery networks (CDN), DNS services, and security for roughly a fifth of all global websites, experienced a core network failure.
Cause: Cloudflare's updates confirm the issue was related to an internal network configuration change that was rolled out globally.
Timeline: The disruption began around 6:00 AM ET / 11:00 AM GMT and quickly escalated, affecting datacenters across North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
🛠️ Cloudflare's Response and Recovery
Cloudflare's engineers immediately launched an investigation and began working on a fix, acknowledging the "widespread 500 errors" and failures even on their own Dashboard and API.
Status: Services are now slowly recovering, but Cloudflare has warned that customers may continue to see higher-than-normal error rates as the network fully stabilizes.
The incident highlights the critical and sometimes fragile nature of the internet's centralized infrastructure, coming only weeks after a similar massive outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
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