Cloudflare outage knocks major sites offline worldwide

In a status update, the internet infrastructure provider said it was “aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing”, while users across multiple regions reported that social platforms, AI tools, gaming servers and payment services were either unreachable or only loading intermittently.

Shortly after 6:00 a.m. Eastern Time (around 11:30 a.m. in the UK), outage trackers began to show a sharp spike in error reports related to Cloudflare and sites that rely on its network. Cloudflare’s own updates indicated that services on its global content delivery and security platform were experiencing internal server errors, returning HTTP 500 codes and, in some cases, breaking the styling of its status pages and support tools.

As the disruption spread, users trying to access X, ChatGPT and other OpenAI pages, Canva, and popular online games such as League of Legends and Valorant encountered failure messages, timeouts and generic internal-error screens. Some websites displayed prompts asking visitors to “please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed”, even though the underlying problem originated in Cloudflare’s own network rather than on end-user devices. 

The outage also briefly hit outage-monitoring services themselves. Downdetector, which aggregates user reports of service problems, was initially taken offline due to its reliance on Cloudflare. When available, its graphs showed tens of thousands of complaints tied to Cloudflare and to individual services, including X and other major sites, before gradually declining as partial recovery began. 

Some reports linked the timing of the disruption to previously scheduled maintenance in Cloudflare’s SCL (Santiago) datacenter, which had been planned for the same window, though Cloudflare has not confirmed any direct connection between that work and the widespread failure on its global network. At the time of the latest updates, the root cause of the incident remained under investigation.

Cloudflare’s role as a content delivery network and security provider meant that the incident affected many unrelated brands at once, since a large number of websites route their traffic through its infrastructure for performance and protection against attacks. The outage followed earlier large-scale disruptions at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in recent weeks, which also caused temporary problems for a wide range of online services.