Written by Tanisha Cardozo || Team Allycaral
A massive Cloudflare outage slammed major online services today, leaving users worldwide unable to access platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Canva, Spotify, Perplexity, and a slew of others. The disruption began around 11 AM IST, with reports of 500‑type errors and “internal server error” messages flooding Downdetector, which itself was temporarily knocked offline.
Cloudflare’s status page quickly acknowledged the problem, confirming a “widespread 500 errors” condition affecting multiple customers and noting that both the Cloudflare Dashboard and API were failing. The company said it was “working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem” and urged patience as error rates remained high even after initial recovery attempts.
The outage has highlighted the internet’s heavy reliance on Cloudflare’s CDN and security infrastructure, which powers roughly one‑third of all web traffic. Users on X reported blank feeds and “something went wrong” screens, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Perplexity users encountered timeouts and error pages. Spotify, Canva, and gaming services like League of Legends also felt the ripple, with Bet365 and Downdetector experiencing partial failures.
In a later update, Cloudflare reported that services like WARP and Cloudflare Access had begun recovering, with error rates for those users returning to pre‑incident levels after changes were made in London. However, the firm warned that higher‑than‑normal error rates could persist as remediation continues.
The incident follows recent large‑scale outages at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, reigniting debate over centralization of web infrastructure and the risks it poses when a single provider falters. Cloudflare has not yet provided a timeline for full restoration, but monitoring sites indicate a gradual decline in reports, suggesting a slow return to normalcy.
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