Cloudflare Outage Brings Down Major Websites Worldwide

A large part of the internet stopped working for many users today. The cause was a major technical problem at Cloudflare, a company that provides important services for a huge number of websites globally.

Cloudflare works behind the scenes to keep websites fast and protect them from online attacks. When their systems failed, the impact quickly spread.

What Happened to Cloudflare?

The problems started around the 2 PM according to Indian time. And Cloudflare itself confirmed the issue on its status page. They said they were seeing “widespread 500 errors.” A “500 error” is a common message that means a website’s server is having a breakdown.

The company said it was an “internal service degradation” and that they were working hard to fix it. While Cloudflare had scheduled maintenance in some parts of the world, it is not yet clear if that maintenance caused the large-scale outage.

Many popular services were affected at the same time because so many websites rely on Cloudflare for key functions like security and content delivery. This highlights how much of the modern internet relies on just a few major infrastructure companies.

Which Websites Were Affected?

Around the world there are several websites are down right now and many of the world’s most-used online platforms had faced issues. Users trying to access these sites were often met with an error screen.

The list of affected services included:

• X (formerly Twitter): This social media platform is completely down, you can’t post and share.
• OpenAI’s ChatGPT: The popular AI chatbot was offline or having severe connection problems.
• Reports indicated that the outage also affected Spotify, the music streaming service.
• Canva: Users trying to use the online design tool reported issues.
• Reports also indicated that the outage affected Perplexity, Letterboxd, and certain online games.

Even Downdetector, a website that monitors the downtime of other websites, struggled to load itself, indicating the extent of the issue.

The Latest Update

Cloudflare’s engineers worked quickly to solve the problem. As of the latest update, the company stated that they are “seeing services recover.” However, they warned that customers might still see higher-than-normal error rates as they continue to fully fix everything.

The incident shows again how a problem at one major company can cause chaos across the entire internet. Tech experts are now looking closely to see what the exact cause of the fault was and how such a widespread failure can be prevented in the future.