Cloudflare has fully restored its services after a widespread outage yesterday disrupted access to major internet platforms, including X, ChatGPT, Canva and Grindr.
According to the company, the outage began at approximately 6.30am ET and was triggered by an automatically generated configuration file intended for security threat management. The file expanded beyond expected limits, causing the traffic-handling software to crash across several Cloudflare services.
Cloudflare, which manages around 20% of global web traffic, said it has deployed a fix and is investigating the incident. While services have largely resumed, some customers may still experience residual impact as recovery progresses worldwide. The company’s shares fell 2.3% in morning trading.
Cloudflare confirmed that there is no indication the outage resulted from a cyberattack or malicious activity. Its infrastructure is designed to help websites and apps perform efficiently and remain operational during traffic surges and cyber threats.
The outage prevented thousands of users from accessing platforms such as X, Canva, Grindr and ChatGPT. Downdetector recorded more than 11,000 user reports at the peak, dropping to around 2,800 by 10.20am ET. As the data is user-submitted, the actual number of affected individuals may vary.
Earlier in the day, Cloudflare said: “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors.”
The incident follows a similar outage last month at Amazon’s cloud service, which disrupted access to popular platforms such as Snapchat and Reddit.
X and OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, did not respond to requests for comment.
Cloudflare continues to monitor performance as services stabilize globally.
