A widespread glitch linked to Cloudflare on Tuesday left many people unable to access popular online platforms, triggering fresh questions about the stability of the systems that keep the internet running. The outages were first noticed shortly after midday GMT, when users began posting large numbers of complaints on monitoring site Downdetector about difficulties loading services such as X.
Cloudflare, which handles a wide range of internet security and traffic management tasks for millions of websites, acknowledged the situation on its service dashboard.
In its statement posted at 11:48 UTC, the company said it had detected an incident affecting some clients. “Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers,” the update read, noting that more information would be shared when available.
The firm plays a major role in the global digital ecosystem, supporting functions such as screening web traffic to ensure visitors are human and not automated programs. According to Cloudflare, about a fifth of all websites across the world depend on its tools in some way. However, details on how many of those were affected on Tuesday, or how severely, remained unclear throughout the day.
Reports from users indicated that the problem was not limited to X alone. Other well-known online platforms also appeared to be unstable for some people, with ChatGPT among the services flagged as experiencing access challenges. OpenAI said it was reviewing the situation but stopped short of confirming whether its issues were tied to Cloudflare’s outage.
This latest disruption comes only weeks after Amazon Web Services suffered a technical breakdown that left more than 1,000 websites and mobile apps temporarily unreachable. Shortly after that incident, Microsoft’s Azure platform experienced its own setback, deepening concern among technology watchers about repeated outages involving major cloud providers.
Analysts say the events highlight how dependent the digital world has become on a handful of companies whose systems support everything from small blogs to major global platforms. They warn that even a brief problem in one of these firms can ripple across the internet, slowing or blocking access to services used by millions.
As investigations continued, many users expressed frustration over the interruptions while others raised alarm about the growing vulnerability of core infrastructure. For now, Cloudflare has not provided a timeline for resolving the issue or clarifying the full scale of the impact.
