A major failure at Cloudflare paralyzed a large portion of the Internet on Tuesday, causing the inaccessibility of some of the most used sites, services and platforms in the world. The exact origin of the incident remains undetermined for the time being, despite the rapid intervention of technical teams.
A sudden blockage with global repercussions
Around midday, countless users found it impossible to load services that were considered robust: X, Feedly, but also several information and business sites. The outage was quickly identified as coming from Cloudflare, a central player in the world’s web infrastructure responsible for the security, routing and availability of online traffic.
The company, which protects or optimizes nearly 20% of the world’s websites, has acknowledged an incident impacting its support portal provider, resulting in massive errors for customers and visitors. She also mentions a potential link with the partial interruption observed on X, as well as repeated difficulties with “human verification” when accessing various platforms.
Major platforms caught in turmoil
The scope of the dysfunction is exceptional: from X (formerly Twitter) to OpenAI, via ChatGPT, Claude AI, and even numerous international media, the interruption struck without distinction. Some major companies have also reported disruptions, including Facebook, AWS, bet365, Canva, Spotify, BrightHR, and even critical hosting services.
The massive dependence of the web on Cloudflare has amplified the domino effect: when such a structuring element falters, the entire chain is weakened.
A source identified, a fix in progress
Around 2 p.m., Cloudflare announced that it had isolated the cause of the outage and was deploying an emergency patch to gradually restore services. The first improvements were observed in certain regions, although the situation remained volatile and subject to returns of instability.
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