Global Cloudflare Outage Takes X, ChatGPT, Others Offline

A major Cloudflare outage on Tuesday evening disrupted several global websites and apps, including X, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Spotify and PayPal. The issue caused widespread “500 errors”, a message indicating that a website’s server is malfunctioning.

Other platforms like Shopify, Udemy, several news and media websites, among others, also were offline.

The issue began after a spike in unusual traffic around 11:20 AM GMT (16:50 PM IST). The company said some traffic moving through its network started returning errors, though most services continued to run normally.

By late evening, Cloudflare said it had deployed fixes and restored most functions, but users could still face higher error rates as systems stabilise. The company added that it was monitoring the situation and would investigate the cause of the traffic spike.

The company has not yet identified the root cause of the abnormal traffic but said its teams are working to ensure full recovery before moving to a detailed investigation.

The disruption quickly spread across sectors. Users reported issues on platforms such as Uber, Canva, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Teams and several gaming services including League of Legends and Genshin Impact. Many sites appeared on Downdetector’s outage list within minutes.

The outage also took down X, just weeks after Elon Musk had mocked AWS for a similar incident. Cloudflare confirmed that applications using its Access and WARP services were recovering, with error levels returning to normal.

The Cloudflare disruption comes a year after a major outage for Microsoft exposed how dependent businesses have become on a handful of infrastructure giants.

In July 2024, Microsoft suffered one of its worst global outages, affecting Microsoft 365, Azure, Teams, PowerBI and other core services. The issue, triggered by a faulty CrowdStrike update, disrupted airlines, banks, brokerages, auto companies and government systems worldwide. 

In India, airlines like IndiGo, Vistara, Akasa and SpiceJet faced check-in delays, handwritten boarding passes, and temporary shut-downs of booking systems. Even airports and brokerage platforms reported downtime during the incident.

For Cloudflare, this marked the second major outage for its network after June 2022. The outage had largely affected the websites of Discord, AWS, Zerodha, Airtel, Shopify, among others.