A significant internet disruption occurred on Tuesday, leaving millions of users facing error messages as numerous popular platforms, including X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT, became suddenly inaccessible. The outage was linked to Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure leader serving nearly one-fifth of the global web. The company has since clarified the cause of the incident, reassuring users that it was not due to a cyberattack. Cloudflare’s CEO and co-founder, Matthew Prince, provided a comprehensive explanation, detailing how the company’s network faced substantial failures around 11:30 am UTC (5 pm IST). During this time, users worldwide experienced slow-loading pages, broken links, and complete inaccessibility to websites utilizing Cloudflare’s services.
Prince stressed that the outage had no connection to malicious actions, stating, “the issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber-attack or malicious activity of any kind.” Instead, Cloudflare attributed the incident to a fault within its Bot Management system, which is designed to distinguish between legitimate human traffic and automated bots. This system allows website owners to establish rules to filter out bot-generated queries. However, a misconfigured query in this feature inadvertently caused the system to block genuine user requests. Essentially, websites that had activated bot-blocking rules became unreachable even for legitimate visitors, while those without these filters continued to function normally, resulting in a widespread but uneven outage.
Initially, Cloudflare’s internal teams suspected a large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack due to the symptoms presented. Yet, further examination found no evidence of malicious activity. Prince noted, “After we initially wrongly suspected the symptoms we were seeing were caused by a hyper-scale DDoS attack, we correctly identified the core issue and were able to stop the propagation of the larger-than-expected feature file and replace it with an earlier version.” He issued a public apology, stating, “We are sorry for the impact to our customers and to the Internet in general.” The magnitude of the outage was significant, with Cloudflare labeling it their most severe disruption since 2019.
Services globally slowed dramatically or went offline entirely for hours, highlighting the internet ecosystem’s reliance on a few major infrastructure providers. Prince acknowledged the seriousness of the failure, commenting, “An outage like today is unacceptable. We’ve architected our systems to be highly resilient to failure to ensure traffic will always continue to flow.” He also reaffirmed the company’s dedication to avoiding such incidents in the future. This disruption occurred shortly after a separate outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which was caused by a DNS issue. In contrast, Cloudflare’s problem originated from internal bot-management settings rather than routing or lookup complications.
Although normal operations have since resumed, the incident underscores the vulnerability of the underlying systems that support the digital world.