A major Cloudflare outage on Tuesday caused widespread disruption across the internet, knocking several high-traffic social media platforms, entertainment services, and productivity tools offline.
The disruptions on X were first flagged around 4:36 pm IST, according to outage tracker Downdetector.com, with reports rapidly increasing as users struggled to load timelines, send posts, or access core features on the platform.
The outage appeared to affect both the mobile app and the web version, leaving many unable to refresh feeds or log in.
X has not yet issued any statement clarifying the cause of the downtime or the extent of the disruption.
Cloudflare, a key internet infrastructure provider whose services support numerous websites and apps, also reported significant issues.
On Tuesday morning, the company posted on its status page that it was investigating the matter.
The outage raised immediate concerns about the ripple effect on platforms depending on Cloudflare’s network.
It reads, “Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly.
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“We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
“We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly,” Cloudflare said in its initial update.
Because Cloudflare sits behind a vast number of online services, protecting them from cyberattacks and ensuring stability during high-traffic moments, the disruption rippled across numerous websites simultaneously.
Cloudflare provides critical backend services for millions of websites worldwide, including security checks and traffic management, and says about 20 per cent of all global websites rely on its infrastructure.
Although the full scale of the outage remains unclear, users also reported difficulties accessing other major platforms, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT. OpenAI said it was reviewing the issue but did not explicitly attribute the disruption to Cloudflare.
Tuesday’s incident comes weeks after a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage knocked more than 1,000 websites and applications offline. Microsoft Azure also suffered service interruptions shortly after the AWS incident.