A number of high-profile websites — including X and ChatGPT — were knocked offline for many users on Tuesday following a significant failure at Cloudflare, a company that underpins much of the internet’s infrastructure.
Reports of outages began pouring into the monitoring platform Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT, as users across the world struggled to access major social networks, AI services, and other online platforms.
Cloudflare confirmed that the disruption stemmed from a configuration file intended to manage threat traffic. Instead of operating as expected, the file caused a crash in the software responsible for routing traffic across many of Cloudflare’s global services.
“This configuration error triggered a widespread service outage,” the company said in a statement. “We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today.”
While services gradually returned for most users, the incident highlighted the internet’s dependence on a handful of infrastructure firms — and how a single point of failure can ripple across the digital ecosystem.
