Cloudflare Outage: Company Reveals What Went Wrong
The surge in abnormal traffic appears to have set off cascading failures across services dependent on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
Internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare suffered a major outage on Tuesday, disrupting access to several high-profile platforms worldwide. Users reported issues on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Shopify and Elon Musk’s social media platform X, according to Downdetector , which itself became inaccessible for some. OpenAI’s status page also confirmed disruptions across ChatGPT and its Sora short-form video app, blaming “an issue with one of our third-party service providers.” Cloudflare later acknowledged a sudden “spike in unusual traffic” that triggered widespread errors across its network.
Cloudflare Cites Unexplained Traffic Surge
A Cloudflare spokesperson said the company observed a “spike in unusual traffic” to one of its services around 6:20 a.m. ET, causing some traffic passing through its network to experience errors.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson added. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
The company said it was “continuing to work on restoring service” for customers, according to an update posted to its status page at 8:35 a.m. ET.
Outage Impacts Major Cloud Ecosystem
Cloudflare’s software underpins traffic management and security for around 20% of the web, including protection against distributed denial-of-service attacks that can overwhelm websites with malicious traffic.
Shares of Cloudflare slid more than 5% in pre-market trading following the disruption.
Tuesday’s issue comes less than a month after Amazon Web Services suffered a day-long outage, followed by a global disruption of Microsoft’s Azure cloud and 365 services. In July 2024, a faulty software upgrade by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused a widespread outage that grounded flights, hit financial services and forced hospitals to delay procedures.
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