A major outage at internet infrastructure company Cloudflare caused widespread disruptions across the web on Tuesday, knocking out access to leading platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and several online gaming services.
The San Francisco–based company confirmed the incident at 11:48 UTC, reporting that it was “investigating an issue potentially impacting multiple customers.” By midday, users worldwide began encountering “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network” notifications while trying to reach affected sites.
The disruption underscored the internet’s growing dependence on centralized providers like Cloudflare, which powers network security, content delivery, and performance for a vast portion of the web. Thousands of websites that rely on Cloudflare’s services experienced downtime simultaneously, leading to what the company described as “widespread 500 errors” across its dashboard and API.
As of the latest update, Cloudflare engineers were working to identify the root cause and restore normal service operations. The incident serves as a stark reminder that even industry-leading infrastructure platforms can face technical vulnerabilities capable of rippling across the global internet.