How a Cloudflare Crash Disrupted X, OpenAI, and More
Major websites appeared to be non-functional due to a technical issue at Cloudflare, a company that effectively holds up a large portion of the internet behind the scenes.
The downtime began around 6:00 AM ET, when Cloudflare's support portal provider started having problems, which led to the decline of Elon Musk's social platform X, along with popular video games such as League of Legends. These outages were reported on Downdetector, a downtime-monitoring service that tracked outages by collecting reports from a wide range of sources. Most of the reports (61 percent) were related to the X app, while 27 percent indicated issues with the website and 12 percent cited “server connection” errors. Users who were impacted received a notification stating there was an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network” and were asked to try again later.
At 7:03 AM ET, Cloudflare announced that its teams were continuing to investigate the issue, and its status page also displayed problems, losing its CSS formatting. Additional updates were provided at 7:21 AM ET, noting that Cloudflare was seeing services recover, although customers might continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as remediation efforts continued. Similarly, about ten minutes later and throughout the hour, as its internal inquiries progressed, X intermittently struggled to load.
Ironically, Downdetector itself experienced technical issues. When it finally loaded, it displayed a significant spike in outage reports.
Cloudflare provides internet infrastructure that includes several essential technologies powering modern online interactions. This includes tools that safeguard websites against cyber threats and maintain their online availability during high-traffic conditions. “Cloudflare is looking into a matter that may affect several customers,” the company stated in an update. “Additional details will be shared as more information is obtained.”
As the outage progressed, more details began to emerge. Cloudflare later reported that the incident had been triggered by a configuration file used to manage threat traffic, which had grown beyond an expected size and caused a crash in the system responsible for handling traffic across several of its services. The company emphasized that the incident was not the result of a cyberattack or malicious activity. By 12:44 PM ET, Cloudflare announced that services had been fully restored, noting that a fix had been implemented and normal functionality was returning across the network. Engineers stated that platforms should be fully operational and that a full incident walkthrough would be published once the investigation had concluded.
Following Cloudflare’s fix, outage reports on Downdetector began to fall sharply, and impacted websites started to load normally again. Several major platforms that had been affected signaled that their services were recovering, though most did not issue detailed public statements. Cloudflare later confirmed it had fully resolved the issue and was monitoring for any lingering errors.
Clients of Cloudflare include:
- X
- OpenAI
- Perplexity
- Gemini
- Deepseek
- Spotify
- League of Legends
- Netflix
- Hulu
- Amazon
- Apple
- Visa
- Zoom
- Walmart
- Doordash
- Canva
- Discord
- WordPress
- Shopify
- Wix
- FedEx
- DHL
- iHerb
- Alibaba
- IBM
- Marriott International
- Postman
- Coinbase
Users should be cautious of these websites in case their services encounter technical issues and fall victim to the same fate as their siblings under Cloudflare.
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