A major technical failure at Cloudflare, a pivotal internet infrastructure and security company, has triggered a massive wave of outages across the web, crippling access to some of the world’s most popular platforms. Users attempting to access services like Canva, X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini were met with errors and intermittent access issues throughout the day.
The widespread disruption quickly drew attention to Cloudflare, which is responsible for powering and protecting a significant portion of the global internet.
Confirmed Degradation: Cloudflare Responds
Cloudflare was swift to confirm the issue, classifying it as an “internal service degradation” on its official status page. The company acknowledged the severity of the problem and its impact on customers:
“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.”
The list of affected platforms grew rapidly as user reports flooded in. The outage specifically hit key AI and productivity tools, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Social media and communication were severely affected, primarily through the widespread issues reported for X. Other tools, such as Canva, were also affected.
Beyond general web services, the impact was also felt by the gaming community. According to data from Downdetector and multiple posts on Reddit, popular video games such as League of Legends, Genshin Impact, and Honkai: Star Rail were also experiencing service disruptions.
Amidst the confusion surrounding the X service issues, an interesting trend in user behavior was noted. Data from Search Atlas revealed that after the X outage began, users turned to Bluesky – a decentralized social platform – to check whether X was working, instead of rivals like Threads or Mastodon.
In its latest updates, Cloudflare reported significant progress in restoring services. The company announced successful changes that allowed two key services to recover fully: “We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates. We have re-enabled WARP access in London.”
While these specific services have stabilized, Cloudflare has cautioned that the network is still in the process of full recovery. The company’s final update noted: “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.” Users are advised to expect potential intermittent issues as Cloudflare works to fully resolve the internal service degradation.
