Global internet disruption as Cloudflare outage hits major websites

A major chunk of the internet’s backend infrastructure faltered on Monday when Cloudflare—the US-based company that protects and powers millions of websites—suffered a global outage, knocking several high-traffic platforms offline and triggering widespread error messages.

Websites including X, OpenAI, and numerous other services logged sharp spikes in disruptions, according to Downdetector, as Cloudflare’s network began throwing errors around 11:20am GMT. Many site owners were also unable to access their dashboards, leaving them blind to performance metrics as problems escalated.

By noon, Cloudflare said it was seeing “services recover”, but warned error rates remained higher than normal. “We are continuing to investigate this issue,” the company said in an update.

A Cloudflare spokesperson said engineers had detected “a spike in unusual traffic” hitting one of its services, causing network instability. “Most traffic for most services continued to flow as normal, but there were elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services,” the spokesperson said. The company has yet to determine the source of the abnormal traffic.

To stabilise the network, Cloudflare temporarily disabled its WARP encrypted service in London, cautioning users that they would be unable to connect via the tool.

The outage highlighted Cloudflare’s outsized—and often little-known—role in the internet’s plumbing. Cybersecurity expert Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey described the firm as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of,” functioning as a global gatekeeper against cyberattacks, including distributed denial-of-service attempts that aim to overwhelm sites with traffic.

Cloudflare engineers had already planned maintenance on several datacentres—including in Tahiti, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Santiago—but it remains unclear whether this coincided with the failure.

The disruption comes weeks after a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage knocked thousands of websites offline, underscoring the vulnerability of the internet’s dependence on a handful of massive infrastructure providers.

While the cause is still uncertain, Woodward said it was unlikely to be a coordinated cyber-attack: “A service so large rarely has a single point of failure,” he noted.