A significant outage at Cloudflare triggered widespread service disruptions across the internet today, affecting major platforms including X (formerly Twitter), Perplexity, and Google’s Gemini. The incident led to error messages and accessibility issues for users worldwide, underscoring how deeply reliant the modern web is on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
Cloudflare acknowledged the problem on its status page, stating, “Cloudflare is aware of and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers. Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing. We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem.” The company later noted that systems were beginning to stabilize but cautioned that users could continue to face “higher-than-normal error rates.”
The outage’s ripple effect was vast. Thousands of complaints poured in as X users struggled to load timelines, and even Downdetector — the site that monitors online outages — displayed its own error messages. OpenAI also reported disruptions to ChatGPT and related tools, though it has not yet confirmed whether Cloudflare’s failure was the root cause.
As platforms recover, the incident serves as a stark reminder of the internet’s interconnected nature — when a major backbone provider like Cloudflare experiences a breakdown, the impact is felt across a large portion of the digital world.
