Cloudflare Outage Takes Down Huge Chunk of the Internet, Slowly Coming Back Online

The internet is down (again).

A wide range of websites (including our very own gizmodo.com) were down on Tuesday morning due to an outage involving internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare.

According to DownDetector, other websites affected by the outage were X, Spotify, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Trump’s social media website Truth Social, gay dating app Grindr, online design platform Canva, and the movie rating app Letterboxd. Even DownDetector’s own website was briefly impacted by the outage.

“Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted,†Cloudflare said in a status update shortly before 7 am ET.

At 8:09 ET, the company shared that the issue had “been identified and a fix is being implemented,†but recovery was somewhat patchy. Dashboard services were restored at 9:34 ET, according to Cloudflare.

Cloudflare told Gizmodo that prior to the first status update being issued, they saw “a spike in unusual traffic†to one of their services. The company does not yet know what caused the spike, but they do know that it caused the traffic passing through their network to experience errors.

“We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic,†Cloudflare said in a statement.

Cloudflare provides the infrastructure and security for many websites worldwide. One of the company’s main areas of service is protecting websites against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which occur when multiple bad actors flood a website or network with traffic requests to overload it and degrade performance or cut off access. Earlier this year, the company said that it had blocked the largest DDoS attack ever recorded.

Tuesday morning’s outage comes less than a month after an Amazon Web Services outage that took sites like WhatsApp, Venmo, Coinbase, and more offline for more than two hours. The outage caused minor chaos at airports and hit online banking. In an assessment following the outage, AWS shared that the root cause was a bug that failed to automatically repair.

Just a week after the AWS incident, the internet had to contend with yet another outage, this time coming from Microsoft Azure. The Azure issue, for the most part, impacted the company’s own services like Xbox.