Cloudflare fully restored its systems on Tuesday after a technical failure blocked thousands of users from accessing major online platforms, including X, Canva, Grindr and ChatGPT. The disruption began around 6.30 a.m. ET and stemmed from an automatically generated configuration file that ballooned in size and crashed software responsible for directing traffic across multiple Cloudflare services.
The company, which handles roughly a fifth of global web traffic, said it has deployed a fix and continues to investigate the incident. Some customers may still face residual issues as the network stabilises worldwide. Cloudflare shares slipped 2.3 percent in morning trading.
The firm stressed there was “no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity”, noting that its infrastructure helps keep websites and apps online by managing traffic spikes and cyber threats.
The outage followed last month’s disruption at Amazon’s cloud division, which temporarily knocked out services such as Snapchat and Reddit and triggered widespread frustration.
During Cloudflare’s service failure, user reports surged on monitoring site Downdetector. Alerts for Cloudflare topped 11,000 before falling to about 2,800 by 10:20 a.m. ET. Downdetector compiles outage data from multiple sources, though user submissions mean actual impacts may differ.
Cloudflare said earlier in the day that “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.”
X and ChatGPT creator OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment.
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