A major outage at internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare knocked parts of the internet offline, disrupting access to X, NJ Transit, ChatGPT and other major platforms early Tuesday morning.
Users were met with an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network” and told to “please try again in a few minutes” as sites relying on the company’s infrastructure failed to load.
The problems began around 6:30 a.m. ET, when several websites intermittently failed before going fully dark.
About 15 minutes later, Cloudflare acknowledged the disruption, saying, “Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers.”
It added, “Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”
Down Detector, which tracks outages, briefly went down itself before showing spikes at X, OpenAI, bet365, League of Legends and payment firm Sage.
Cloudflare later updated its status, saying it was “continuing to investigate this issue,” and reported early signs of improvement: “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
Cloudflare has not identified the cause of the outage.
The outage is the latest significant glitch to hit the internet in recent years as users have witnessed just how vulnerable global digital infrastructure has become.
The most damaging was CrowdStrike’s failure from July of last year, when a faulty Falcon Sensor update crashed 8.5 million Windows systems and caused more than $10 billion in losses across aviation, healthcare and financial services.
In February 2024, an AT&T network configuration mistake crippled mobile service nationwide for more than 12 hours, blocking tens of millions of calls — including thousands to 911 — and triggering a federal settlement.
Cloud platforms suffered significant disruptions as well. Microsoft Azure endured multi-continent outages in 2023 and 2024 from a faulty router update, a DDoS attack and a regional power incident.
Most recently, Amazon Web Services, a provider that supports roughly one-third of the internet, experienced a DNS (domain name system) failure that took down major apps.
Other critical systems faltered too. The FAA’s NOTAM failure in 2023 grounded flights nationwide after a contractor deleted essential files, while ransomware attacks across healthcare in 2023 and 2024 forced hospitals into prolonged manual operations with average downtime of 24 days.
The Post has sought comment from Cloudflare.
