Internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare suffered a global outage on Tuesday morning, disrupting access to numerous popular websites, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Elon Musk’s social media platform X. The disruption began around 6:20 a.m. ET when Cloudflare detected an “unusual spike in traffic” targeting one of its services, causing errors for some users worldwide.
Downdetector reported widespread issues, though the site itself was temporarily unreachable for some. OpenAI’s official status page confirmed problems with ChatGPT and its Sora video tool were linked to “an issue with one of our third-party providers,” widely understood to be Cloudflare.
A Cloudflare spokesperson stated: “We are all hands on deck investigating the cause and working to restore full service.” By 8:35 a.m. ET, the company posted that it was continuing recovery efforts. Cloudflare powers traffic management and security for roughly 20% of all websites, including protection against DDoS attacks.
The incident triggered a more than 5% drop in the company’s shares during pre-market trading. The outage follows a string of recent major tech disruptions, including Amazon Web Services’ day-long failure last month, Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 global issues, and July’s massive CrowdStrike software update that grounded flights and crippled industries worldwide.
