Newsroom
Cloudflare resolved a major service disruption on Tuesday that temporarily took down a wide range of prominent websites and online platforms around the world.
The internet infrastructure company reported that the outage began early in the morning, with a surge of abnormal traffic appearing around 5:20 a.m. ET. The issue caused crashes in the software responsible for routing and protecting traffic across several Cloudflare services. According to the company, the underlying problem was an automatically generated configuration file that ballooned far beyond its intended size, overwhelming part of the system.
Sites including X, Shopify, Indeed, Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI services such as ChatGPT and Sora, Truth Social, and even some digital tools for New Jersey Transit were among the services disrupted. Downdetector, which tracks outages, also experienced brief accessibility issues. OpenAI said its products were fully recovered once its third-party provider (Cloudflare) implemented a fix.
Cloudflare reported at 9:57 a.m. ET that it had deployed a solution and was monitoring systems as access gradually returned to normal. The company emphasized that current evidence does not suggest hacking or other malicious activity.
“Any outage is unacceptable,” a spokesperson said, adding an apology to customers and internet users affected.
Cloudflare plays a central role in global web infrastructure, providing security and traffic management tools for roughly one-fifth of all websites. Its offerings include defenses against distributed denial-of-service attacks, which attempt to overwhelm systems with excessive traffic.
The company’s stock fell more than 4% following the incident.
This disruption follows a series of recent high-profile technical failures among major cloud and cybersecurity providers. Amazon Web Services experienced a lengthy malfunction last month, shortly before a worldwide outage hit Microsoft’s Azure and 365 services. Earlier in July, a flawed software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused widespread operational breakdowns across airlines, banks, and hospitals.
With information from CNBC.
