Cloudflare Outage Takes Down Major Websites

A major Cloudflare outage on Tuesday caused widespread disruptions across global websites and online services. Users struggled to access platforms such as OpenAI, Spotify, X (formerly Twitter), bet365, Virgin Media, EE, and Grindr, with many pages failing to load fully. Even Downdetector, the service that monitors outages, was itself temporarily unreachable.

Cloudflare reported the issue on its status page, stating that its global network was “experiencing issues.” The company confirmed that it began implementing fixes approximately three hours into the disruption, and service gradually improved from there. Later that day, Cloudflare announced a full return to normal operations.

The company later attributed the incident to a configuration file automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew unexpectedly large and triggered a crash in software responsible for handling customer traffic. Because of Cloudflare’s extensive role in hosting and protecting web traffic, the failure affected a broad range of organizations simultaneously.

Many businesses rely on Cloudflare’s content delivery network (CDN) to speed up website performance and block attacks such as distributed denial-of-service attempts. CDNs store website content closer to users for faster access, but this centralization can create cascading failures when a provider experiences trouble. As the outage showed, a single malfunction can disrupt hundreds of popular sites at once.

Service interruptions like these often spark speculation about cyberattacks, yet experts note that most outages stem from misconfigurations or human error. The Cloudflare incident follows a similar outage last month involving Amazon Web Services, reinforcing concerns about the growing risk of global disruption tied to infrastructure providers that support much of today’s digital economy.