Cloudflare’s internet infrastructure experienced a significant outage on Tuesday, temporarily taking down numerous major websites for users around the world.
Downdetector, which briefly became inaccessible, reported that the outage affected a wide range of services, including Shopify, Indeed, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, ChatGPT, OpenAI, Donald Trump’s Truth Social, and Elon Musk’s X.
In an official statement, Cloudflare confirmed that the outage was due to a change in the database systems’ permissions that allowed the database to output multiple entries into a single “feature file” used by their Bot Management system. As a result, the feature file doubled in size and was subsequently propagated to all machines across Cloudflare’s service network.
Most affected platforms were restored within a few hours. By 9:57 a.m. ET, Cloudflare reported on its status page that a fix had been deployed, though some users might still encounter problems accessing the company’s dashboard. “We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” the update noted.
OpenAI reported that ChatGPT and its Sora short-form video app had fully recovered after experiencing issues linked to a “third-party service provider.”
A Cloudflare spokesperson explained that the incident stemmed from an automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic. The file “grew beyond an expected size of entries,” causing the software responsible for directing traffic across several services to crash. The company first noticed a “spike in unusual traffic” at 5:20 a.m. ET.
According to Cloudflare system status the majority of services have been restored to normal operational status in Asia, Europe, Middle East, North America, Oceania and Africa while some services still remain as re-routed or partially re-routed and scheduled data center maintenance is currently in progress.
Cloudflare emphasized that there is no indication that the outage was caused by an attack or other malicious activity. “Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” the spokesperson said. “We apologize to our customers and the internet in general for letting you down today.”
Cloudflare’s systems support roughly 20 percent of global web traffic, providing security and performance services for businesses worldwide, including protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks that attempt to overwhelm websites with excessive traffic.
Cloudflare’s is a US$ 70 billion company and its stock dropped more than 2 percent because of the outage.