A significant internet disruption unfolded on Tuesday morning after a widespread Cloudflare outage caused numerous popular services to go offline or respond sluggishly. Platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify, X, and several others reported issues, as all depend on Cloudflare’s global infrastructure to remain operational.
Cloudflare confirmed the incident shortly after 8 a.m. ET on its status page, stating that engineers had identified the problem and were deploying a fix. Within two hours, the company reported that the outage had been resolved, though monitoring and secondary fixes were still underway.
In a post on X, Cloudflare chief technology officer Dane Knecht attributed the disruption to a “latent bug” hidden within one of the firm’s internal systems. Such bugs typically remain undetected under normal conditions but can cause critical failures when triggered by specific changes. In this case, a routine configuration update caused part of Cloudflare’s bot mitigation system to crash, setting off a cascading chain reaction across the network.
“In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack,” Knecht explained.
Knecht apologised to customers, acknowledging that Cloudflare had let down its users and “the broader internet,” and promised a detailed postmortem soon. “I know it caused real pain today,” he added.
While most services recovered quickly, Cloudflare noted that some users might still encounter issues accessing the Cloudflare dashboard. A separate fix is being worked on as engineers continue monitoring for any lingering abnormalities.
The outage comes just weeks after an Amazon Web Services disruption, highlighting the internet’s heavy dependence on a small number of infrastructure providers. Cloudflare alone supports an estimated 20 percent of all websites, operating data centres in 330 cities with connections to over 13,000 networks worldwide. As a major provider of DDoS protection, the scope and impact of Tuesday’s disruption underscore the fragility and interconnectedness of today’s digital ecosystem.
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