Cloudflare outage briefly knocks websites offline around the world
A major outage at Cloudflare, one of the internet’s key behind the scenes infrastructure providers, disrupted access to millions of websites on Tuesday, triggering waves of error messages for users globally.
The US company, which helps protect and accelerate traffic for websites, apps and APIs, confirmed that an internal technical fault caused some customers’ sites to become unreachable and locked others out of their performance dashboards. Monitoring service Downdetector recorded spikes in reported problems for platforms including X and OpenAI during the same period.
The incident began at 11.48am in London. About three hours later, at 2.48pm, Cloudflare said it had rolled out a fix and believed the issue was resolved, while continuing to monitor systems as traffic returned to normal levels.
As part of its emergency response, the company temporarily disabled its Warp encrypted internet service in London, warning users who tried to connect through Warp that they might be unable to reach the internet during the disruption.
Cloudflare later said the outage was caused by a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage suspicious or malicious traffic. That file grew far beyond the size engineers expected, which in turn caused the software that handles traffic for several Cloudflare services to crash.
The company stressed that it had found no evidence the incident was triggered by a cyber attack or any other malicious activity. It cautioned that some services could experience brief slowdowns while demand surged in the immediate aftermath of the fix, but said it expected everything to stabilise within hours.
Cloudflare plays a central role in keeping the modern web online and secure, offering tools that block distributed denial of service attacks and filter automated traffic so that only genuine human users reach a site. Professor Alan Woodward of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security has previously described the firm as one of the internet’s invisible gatekeepers, sitting between users and the websites they visit.
The outage follows a separate disruption less than a month ago at Amazon Web Services, which also left thousands of sites temporarily unavailable. Together, the incidents highlight how heavily the global internet now relies on a small number of infrastructure companies. When one of those providers falters, the impact is felt almost immediately and at scale.
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