Cloudflare crash takes millions of websites offline: What we know so far
Cloudflare experienced a major outage (photo: Getty Images)
Cloudflare, one of the world's largest content delivery and website protection networks, has experienced a major global outage. Users around the world are reporting that websites and online services are unavailable, citing Cloudflare's official website.
What is not working and who has been affected
According to user reports and data from specialized media outlets, the outage has affected a wide range of services. Popular platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), a number of news and entertainment websites, as well as services that operate via API, are experiencing problems.
Services and sites such as Pokerogue, ChatGPT, X (Twitter), Spotify, TikTok, WhatsApp, Pinterest, and others were affected by the Cloudflare outage.
The number of complaints on Downdetector increased within minutes after Cloudflare confirmed the incident. Reuters notes that during the same period, a failure was also observed in X — the service became unavailable to thousands of users in the US, although a direct connection with Cloudflare's problems has not yet been established.
Tech magazines report that the outage affected web pages, API requests, and some online games that use Cloudflare for DNS, routing, and protection against DDoS attacks. Many sites began displaying site not available pages and various errors.
Cloudflare's monitoring tools also detect traffic anomalies and regional outages, which means that website availability may vary depending on the region and point of presence (PoP) used.
How Cloudflare issues affect the internet
Cloudflare sits between users and millions of websites, providing DNS resolution, content delivery, caching, encryption, attack protection, and traffic filtering.
Therefore, a failure in one service or region can cause errors on many websites, even those that are not directly related to each other. Experts note that the high concentration of infrastructure in the hands of a few large providers creates systemic risks for the entire network.
What Cloudflare says
The company confirms that engineers are investigating the causes of the incident and working to mitigate its impact. Updates are published in real time on Cloudflare's status page and in the company's analytics tools. Users and customers are advised to follow official updates.
If the site returns a Cloudflare error (500/502/522, etc.), the problem is most likely on the CDN side, and refreshing the page rarely helps — you need to wait for the failure to be completely resolved.
