Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Major Online Services Worldwide

Cloudflare experienced a global outage that disrupted access to multiple internet services, including ChatGPT, X, Shopify, and additional platforms used by organizations worldwide. The incident generated widespread errors and temporary service limitations.

Cloudflare reported a “degradation of internal service,” stating that “some services may be intermittently impacted, and the company is focused on restoring service.” A Cloudflare spokesperson explained that the company observed “a spike in unusual traffic” prior to the network errors.

The broader cloud ecosystem has reported significant outages in previous months. In July 2024, CrowdStrike released a faulty software update that produced outages affecting airlines, financial services, and hospital operations. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure also reported disruptions in recent periods, raising corporate concerns regarding operational resilience among large-scale infrastructure providers.

Given the number of businesses that depend on consistent internet availability, outages in a company with Cloudflare’s global reach create immediate operational challenges and disruptions in sales channels, customer service functions, and productivity systems.

Cloudflare says that it detected an unusual increase in traffic at about 6:20 a.m. ET, which contributed to network errors across its infrastructure. As a result, multiple services experienced interruptions. DownDetector, which tracks real-time service outages, reported disruptions in ChatGPT, Sora, X, Shopify, Indeed, Truth Social, League of Legends, and Spotify, among others. DownDetector also experienced intermittent inaccessibility.

OpenAI reported that ChatGPT and the Sora video application were impacted due to an issue originating from “one of our third-party service providers,” referencing Cloudflare. NJ Transit said that specific digital services were affected “due to a vendor.”

Cloudflare confirmed   that the issue was affecting “multiple customers.” Users observed widespread five hundred errors, failures in the Cloudflare Dashboard, and failures in the company’s application programming interfaces. As part of the remediation process, Cloudflare temporarily disabled WARP access in London. The company later reported that WARP access was restored once error rates returned to levels recorded before the incident.

Cloudflare says that it is working on a fix for remaining services. The company adds that Access and WARP had recovered, noting that efforts to restore all functionality were still in progress.

Financial market activity reflected immediate reactions to the outage. According to Barron’s reports, Cloudflare’s stock decreased 3.5% to US$195.10. The decline contrasted with the company’s performance earlier in the year, which represented an 88% increase compared with a 13% rise in the S&P 500. Analysts attributed the drop to investor concern regarding the operational disruption.

Cloudflare continues to investigate the cause of the unusual traffic surge that preceded the outage. The company says that technical teams remain focused on ensuring full restoration of all services and preventing similar incidents.