Cloudflare outage hits X, ChatGPT and other major platforms as parts of the internet go 'down'

Global internet outage

A major Cloudflare outage has briefly taken chunks of the internet offline, leaving users unable to load popular sites including X and Letterboxd. The disruption began earlier this afternoon and quickly spread across platforms that rely on Cloudflare’s infrastructure to stay online.

Large parts of the web stopped working on Friday after a technical fault at Cloudflare caused widespread disruption. Users visiting sites such as X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, and film review service Letterboxd were met with an error message explaining that Cloudflare’s network was unable to load the page. There were some reports about OpenAI also being down on Downdetector.

Cloudflare sits behind a vast portion of the modern internet. It powers content delivery, security protections and tools that keep websites online during traffic spikes or cyber attacks. When its systems fail, the impact ripples far beyond any single service. This time was no different. A broad range of unrelated websites appeared to go down at the same moment, echoing the scale of last month’s AWS outage.

In an initial update, Cloudflare confirmed that it was “aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers”, though it did not share a cause or a timeline for a fix. The problems began around 11.30am UK time. Some pages loaded on refresh, but most users continued to see an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network” telling them to try again later.

Even Down Detector, the outage tracking site many users turn to first, struggled to load because it also relies on Cloudflare. When it eventually came back, it showed a spike in reports on platforms like X and Spotify.

Cloudflare posted a follow-up update 15 minutes later to say that investigations were continuing, but again offered no clue about the underlying fault. With so many major platforms leaning on Cloudflare’s infrastructure, the outage served as another reminder of how dependent the internet has become on a few core providers.