Cloudflare Outage - The disruption that brought down tech giants like X, ChatGPT
The year 2025 is showing us how many challenges we can face in the modern tech era. It started with the global outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) on October 20, 2025. AWS's US-EAST-1 region faced a major disruption that lasted over 15 hours and impacted countless services that rely on them including Slack, Atlassian, Snapchat, etc.
These global outages instantly helped us see the bigger picture. On the internet, we can't rely upon only a single service provider and we must have some backup solutions because according to the scenario, everything is error-prone, not even the tech giant AWS itself! We thought that other providers would learn a lesson from it and would ensure that nothing like this ever happens in the future.
Well, it seems that the same thing happened again! But this time, it's on another popular platform, Cloudflare. Yes, you heard it right! A lot of applications rely upon Cloudflare in many aspects but it just broke almost half of the internet instantly due to this outage. It is an internet infrastructure that offers many of the core technologies that power today's online experiences including tools that protect websites from cyber attacks and ensure that the relied websites stay online amid heavy traffic, no matter what. Today, we are seeing that Cloudflare itself is facing an outage due to technical issues and thousands of websites that depend on it have stopped working.
Impact of Cloudflare Outage
According to Downdetector, popular e-commerce platform Shopify, Anthropic's Claude, job search engine Indeed, popular designing website Canva, Elon Musk's popular social media platform X (earlier, Twitter), and even President Donald Trump's Truth Social - they have all been affected by the Cloudflare outage today. OpenAI's ChatGPT and Sora (popular AI short-form video generator) reported having "an issue with one of our third party service providers" (Cloudflare).
A Cloudflare spokesperson said to CNBC that the company observed a spike in unusual traffic to one of its services around 6:20 a.m. ET, which caused some traffic passing through its network to experience errors. Cloudflare's shares just slid more than 3% for this outage!
At 09:22 a.m. ET, Cloudflare announced that they are continuing to work on a fix in an updated post on its status page. However, the entire internet is now waiting for it to get fixed as soon as possible. Currently, Cloudflare is helping to manage and secure traffic for about 20% of the entire World Wide Web.
The entire world is now shocked as Cloudflare is used heavily for its support where it guards against distributed denial of service attacks, bot attacks, web application firewall (WAF), content delivery network (CDN), DNS service, etc.
Why Cloudflare matters?
If we try to understand why Cloudflare's outage is widespread worldwide, we must understand Cloudflare's role in the grand scheme of the internet. It is not just any typical website hosting service like AWS. It is a complete internet infrastructure service that provides mission-critical functions to billions of websites and online applications.
Cloudflare operates a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and it essentially copies a specific website's content and stores it on various servers across the world. Let's say a user is requesting a website, the CDN then delivers the content from the nearest server and it makes the site load faster naturally. As the users are getting data from the nearest server, no matter from which part of the world the user is requesting the data on the internet, it always stays fast through CDN. Not only that, Cloudflare provides some crucial security features as well. It includes protection against massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks where many kinds of bad actors attempt to flood a victim's server with overwhelming traffic suddenly to make the server fail.
Therefore, when the guard of the internet, Cloudflare itself, experiences any fault, any website that relies upon its CDN or security protection layers starts to suffer instantly. The web traffic fails to fetch content, might encounter broken links within the Cloudflare system and resulting in many server error type messages. Imagine the city's central bridge is shut down. All the buildings and houses are still there and functioning, but they're basically unreachable. The world faced the same thing today for the Cloudflare outage.
What happened to Cloudflare?
Cloudflare still hasn't revealed the exact root cause. However, they are investigating a potential factor and that is a period of scheduled maintenance. Cloudflare already posted a notice about maintenance in its Santiago (SCL) data center, cautioning that traffic might be rerouted. They notified that it might potentially lead to a slight increase in latency for end users in that region. Although maintenance is common, a complex system failure during a scheduled adjustment is a known cause.
Cloudflare has confirmed that they have fully resolved the issue and deployed the fix globally. At the time of writing, Cloudflare's updates have restored Cloudflare access and WARP functionality, including recovery in the London region.
Isn't there a way to avoid these major outages?
By this time, this question has become a general question as we have already seen the impact of global outages of some popular platforms recently. The internet infrastructure is typically a highly complex system and they must ensure that the maintenance teams are available 24x7 to fix any issue. However, there might be a lot of complications here and there. Therefore, the platforms can't rely only on the traditional incident resolution approach, as it takes more time and effort just to identify the specific incident in the system.
Therefore, implementing a robust and effective Incident Management & Response System is a mandatory step for all kinds of infrastructure. There are some popular Incident Management and Response applications which do exactly that and save the Internet as a process, such as TaskCall, PagerDuty, Incident.io, etc.
The team can create several routine-based layouts for each specific micro component to ensure that when any issue occurs, the relevant team gets notified instantly. It also ensures that no incident goes unnoticed or unresolved. Therefore, these systems can save a lot of time, effort, money and most importantly, save us from any future outages.
Cover Photo by SEO Galaxy on Unsplash
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