Cloudflare Fixes Major Outage That Disrupted X, ChatGPT and Global Websites

By Staff, Agencies

Cloudflare announced on Tuesday that it had resolved a major outage that temporarily knocked several major websites offline worldwide.

The company confirmed at 9:57 a.m. ET that a fix had been implemented, though some users might still face issues accessing its dashboard as systems fully stabilize.

According to Cloudflare and monitoring site Downdetector, the outage affected a wide range of platforms, including Shopify, Indeed, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, President Donald Trump’s Truth Social, and Elon Musk’s platform X. Some services of NJ Transit were also disrupted. Downdetector itself briefly became inaccessible.

OpenAI reported that both ChatGPT and its Sora video app have fully recovered from disruptions linked to a “third-party service provider.”

Cloudflare later identified the root cause as an automatically generated configuration file—intended to manage threat traffic—that grew larger than expected. Its excessive size caused a crash in the traffic management software used across several Cloudflare services. The company first noticed a sharp rise in “unusual traffic” around 5:20 a.m. ET.

Cloudflare emphasized there is no indication that the outage resulted from a cyberattack or malicious activity.

“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” a spokesperson said. “We apologize to our customers and the internet in general for letting you down today.”

Cloudflare provides critical infrastructure for about 20% of the global web, including protection against distributed denial-of-service attacks. The outage caused the company’s shares to fall more than 2%.

This incident follows a series of major tech disruptions in recent months, including outages at Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and 365, and the widespread global failure in July 2024 caused by a faulty CrowdStrike software update.