A widespread Cloudflare outage crashed some of the internet's biggest platforms Tuesday morning, taking down OpenAI's ChatGPT, X, Shopify, and dozens of other major sites for hours. The infrastructure giant, which powers roughly 20% of the web, says it's resolved the issue that left millions of users staring at error pages during peak business hours.
The internet's backbone just had a very public stumble. Cloudflare, the infrastructure company that keeps roughly 20% of the web running smoothly, suffered a major outage Tuesday that sent shockwaves across the digital landscape, knocking offline everything from OpenAI's ChatGPT to Elon Musk's social platform X.
The chaos began around 5:20 AM ET when Cloudflare detected what it called a "spike in unusual traffic." Within minutes, users worldwide found themselves staring at error pages instead of their favorite apps. ChatGPT went dark. X users couldn't tweet. Shopify merchants couldn't process orders. Even job seekers found Indeed inaccessible during what's typically peak hiring season.
"Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable," a company spokesperson told CNBC. "We apologize to our customers and the internet in general for letting you down today."
The culprit wasn't a cyberattack or malicious breach - it was something far more mundane but equally devastating. An automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic "grew beyond an expected size of entries," triggering a cascade failure in the software systems that route traffic for Cloudflare's vast network of services.
The outage's ripple effects revealed just how dependent the modern internet has become on a handful of infrastructure providers. Beyond the headline-grabbing casualties like ChatGPT and X, the disruption hit Anthropic's Claude chatbot, President Trump's Truth Social platform, and even some of NJ Transit's digital services. Downdetector, the site people typically turn to during outages, was itself briefly unreachable.
OpenAI confirmed on its status page that both ChatGPT and its new Sora video app experienced issues due to a "third-party service provider" - corporate speak for pointing the finger at Cloudflare. The AI company's services fully recovered once the infrastructure issue was resolved.
