A major outage at Cloudflare this morning took down some of the most popular websites on the internet. If you tried to visit PayPal, ChatGPT, X, or even DownDetector, you probably saw error messages or the site would not load at all. The problem was not your phone, your internet connection, or your device. The problem was with Cloudflare, one of the largest internet infrastructure companies in the world.
Most of us think of the internet as apps and websites. Behind the scenes, however, only a small group of companies keep all of it running. Cloudflare is one of those companies. It protects websites from cyber threats, speeds up how pages load, filters out bots, and verifies that incoming traffic is from real users. If a website uses Cloudflare, your connection passes through its network before the page ever appears on your screen.
Cloudflare reported a sudden surge in unusual traffic early this morning. At the same time, one of its internal systems experienced a configuration error. That combination caused a critical software crash in the part of Cloudflare that checks whether you are a real person. When that system went down, websites that rely on Cloudflare could not finish loading. PayPal displayed error messages. ChatGPT stopped responding. Even DownDetector, the site that reports outages, went offline for a short time.
The timing made the outage even more noticeable. Problems began just as people were waking up and logging on. Once DownDetector recovered, nearly the entire front page of the site was filled with outage reports from major apps and services.
The natural question many people asked was whether this was a cyber attack. Denial of service attacks, which flood systems with junk traffic, can look similar to a sudden traffic spike. Some experts say the surge resembles what you might see during a denial of service event. Others caution that Cloudflare is built to absorb extremely large attacks and has not found any evidence of malicious activity. So far, Cloudflare believes the root cause was a software configuration error, not a confirmed attack.
This morning’s outage is a reminder of how dependent the internet is on a very small group of companies. A handful of providers handle website traffic, cloud hosting, routing, and security for millions of sites. When even one of them has a problem, the effects spread across the internet in seconds.
This was the third major interruption from a large technology provider in just a few years. Last summer, a faulty software update from CrowdStrike caused millions of Windows computers around the world to crash, grounding flights, disrupting hospitals, and shutting down business operations for hours. Today’s outage was another example of how one mistake behind the scenes can disrupt the digital services we use every day.
Cloudflare says most services have now been restored and a full report will be released later today. If your favorite website was not working this morning, now you know what happened.
