CLOUDFLARE CRASH TAKES DOWN X (TWITTER), CHATGPT, AND GLOBAL WEBSITES IN MASS OUTAGE

CLOUDFLARE CRASH TAKES DOWN X (TWITTER), CHATGPT, AND GLOBAL WEBSITES IN MASS OUTAGE

Cloudflare Under Siege: Millions Kicked Offline as ‘Internal Degradation’ Sparks Chaos

A massive and sudden outage at internet infrastructure behemoth Cloudflare sent shockwaves across the globe today, sparking an “Internet Meltdown” that temporarily took down many of the world’s most-used platforms, including X (Twitter) and ChatGPT.

The crisis began with an “internal service degradation” just before noon UTC, leaving users scrambling and fueling concerns over the fragility of global digital services. Cloudflare, which acts as a crucial shield and accelerator for a substantial portion of all web traffic, confirmed the disruption followed a “spike in unusual traffic” at approximately 11:20 UTC.

Key Platforms Go DARK

The sheer scale of Cloudflare’s importance was instantly apparent as major services relying on its network were suddenly inaccessible. Outage reports soared to nearly 5,000 at their peak on Downdetector, with users reporting frustrating errors while trying to access:

• X (Twitter): The social media giant was among the most prominent casualties.
• ChatGPT: OpenAI’s wildly popular AI chatbot was offline for millions.
• Canva, Spotify, and Grindr: Thousands of users trying to work, stream, or connect were shut out.

The market reacted swiftly, with Cloudflare’s shares reportedly down about 5% in premarket trading as the full impact of the chaos became clear.

The Fix and The Fallout

In a rapid sequence of status updates, the company’s engineering teams raced to contain the crisis.

• By 13:09 UTC, Cloudflare announced the issue was identified and a fix was being deployed.
• Initial recovery was reported for services like Cloudflare Access and WARP (its VPN), but the full restoration for application services customers proved to be a protracted effort, continuing well into the afternoon.

The incident is a stark reminder of the concentrated power—and risk—inherent in modern internet architecture. It follows a similar widespread disruption caused by an Amazon cloud service outage last month.

As Cloudflare works to fully restore all services, the incident serves as a blazing red warning sign for companies worldwide: the stability of your business rests on a handful of crucial infrastructure providers, and when one stumbles, the entire internet feels the tremor.