Web traffic on several major sites was disrupted globally on Tuesday afternoon following an unidentified issue affecting Cloudflare, a US-based firm that provides security and performance services for websites and networks.
Millions of internet users were unable to access some platforms, including social media site X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT, after Cloudflare suffered a systems failure.
“Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate,” the company said on its status page.
Users attempting to load affected sites encountered messages such as “internal server error” and “there is an internal server error on Cloudflare's network.”
According to Downdetector, which tracks real-time outages, Cloudflare began experiencing problems from 2.16pm, with reports surging from two incidents to thousands by 2.46pm.
In a 4pm update, Cloudflare said: “We are continuing working on restoring service for application services customers.”
Cloudflare sits between a website’s server and its users, helping to block cyberattacks, speed up load times and prevent servers from being overwhelmed. Because so many platforms rely on Cloudflare for routing and protection, a disruption in its systems can trigger widespread outages across multiple services at once.
