A global outage at Cloudflare, a US-based internet infrastructure company, caused error messages on numerous websites on Tuesday. The issue, which began at 11:48 AM London time, affected access to sites including X and OpenAI, according to Downdetector.
Cloudflare provides services such as DDoS protection and performance acceleration for millions of websites. The company identified the root cause as an oversized configuration file that crashed the software handling traffic for several services. By 2:48 PM, Cloudflare reported implementing a fix and believed the incident was resolved, though monitoring continued.
A spokesperson apologised to customers and the internet, stating, 'We will learn from today’s incident and improve.' During the outage, Cloudflare disabled its Warp encryption service in London, causing connection failures for users there.
Professor Alan Woodward of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security described Cloudflare as 'the biggest company you’ve never heard of' and a 'gatekeeper' for internet traffic. He noted that the incident highlights the fragility of relying on a small number of infrastructure providers, coming less than a month after an Amazon Web Services outage.
Cloudflare emphasised that there was no evidence of malicious activity behind the outage. Some services were expected to be briefly degraded as traffic spiked post-incident, but full normalisation was anticipated within hours.
