Cloudflare Outage Hits Major Sites Worldwide

A widespread outage at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare disrupted access to numerous popular websites on Tuesday, affecting millions of users globally. The issue, which began around 11:30 a.m. UK time, impacted services including the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter; design tool Canva; betting site Bet365; film review platform Letterboxd; music streaming service Spotify; and AI chatbot ChatGPT. Users encountered error messages, such as "internal server error" or code 500, indicating problems with Cloudflare's network.

Cloudflare, which delivers core technologies to power online experiences, acknowledged the disruption shortly after it started. In an update posted at 11:48 a.m. UTC on its service status dashboard, the company stated, "Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers. Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available." About 15 minutes later, Cloudflare confirmed it was continuing to probe the problem without specifying a cause or timeline for resolution. The outage stemmed from widespread 500 errors across its global network, along with failures in its dashboard and...