Cloudflare outage knocks sites offline worldwide
A major outage at Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest internet infrastructure firms, disrupted access to multiple high-profile websites on Tuesday, affecting users worldwide — including in Bangladesh.
Platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Letterboxd and several other major services temporarily went offline, displaying error notices linked to Cloudflare’s systems. Many users saw messages such as “internal server error” or were asked to “try again later.”
Cloudflare confirmed the disruption shortly after the issue began around 11:30am UK time, saying it was investigating “an issue which impacts multiple customers,” including widespread 500 errors affecting both the Cloudflare network and its dashboard.
In a later statement, the company said it had experienced “a spike in unusual traffic” at around 11:20 UTC, which triggered failures across its network.
“We are all hands-on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors,” the company said, adding that the cause of the traffic spike remains unknown.
Outage tracking platform Downdetector also showed a sharp surge in complaints — before itself briefly going offline due to the same issue.
Some services began to partially recover in the afternoon, though Cloudflare warned users may still experience instability while remediation continues.
Cloudflare provides security, traffic management and protection against cyberattacks for roughly 20% of the world’s websites, meaning disruptions can have widespread consequences.
Experts say the outage reveals the vulnerability created by the internet’s reliance on a handful of infrastructure providers.
Alp Toker from NetBlocks called the event “a catastrophic disruption to Cloudflare’s infrastructure”, noting that while Cloudflare shields sites from cyberattacks, its dominance has made it “one of the internet’s largest points of failure.”
Cybersecurity adviser Jake Moore echoed the concern: “Recent outages involving AWS, Microsoft Azure and now Cloudflare highlight how dependent the internet has become on a few fragile networks.”
Cloudflare is a global web infrastructure and security company that helps websites run faster, safer, and more reliably. It acts as a middle layer between a website and its visitors, filtering harmful traffic, blocking cyberattacks and managing high volumes of data to prevent sites from crashing. Cloudflare also improves website speed by storing copies of web content on servers around the world, allowing users to access it from the nearest location.