Sections of the internet appeared to be hobbled as Cloudflare, the web infrastructure and website security provider that manages the traffic for more than 12 million sites globally, reported an outage that left some people unable to access those sites Tuesday morning. The edge provider said it has put in place mitigations and is monitoring recovery, with some clients still eXperiencing login and challenge problems.
What happened during the Cloudflare outage today
Cloudflare admitted to a network-wide issue that was affecting numerous users, citing an abnormal spike in traffic hitting one of its services and causing error messages for requests going through its edge. The company said a fix is in progress, with teams concentrating on stabilizing flows before moving on to a root cause analysis. Status is reporting application-layer services to be among the final ones for full restoration of all users.
From early indications, the incident didn’t present itself as a regional connectivity loss so much as an application service choke. That pattern seems to match the reports of access problems, authentication friction, and periodic 5xx errors that I saw rather than a full-blown routing blackout.
Which sites and services were affected by the outage
Monitoring platforms and user reports registered problems across a grab bag of popular destinations, such as Archive of Our Own, Canva, Depop, Grindr, League of Legends, OpenAI, Spotify, X — and even the trackers for service status. Several pages showed prompts that pointed to Cloudflare’s challenge service, an indication that mistimed bots or access verification flows were seeing heavy traffic.
Because Cloudflare sits in front of so many properties, impact depended on the site and which products a customer used; DNS services and content delivery networks (CDN) made to protect against distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS), and zero-trust access technologies, could fail in different ways. Some services gracefully degraded with slower load times; others spit out gateway errors or had login pages blocked.
Why a Cloudflare outage spreads across the web
Cloudflare runs one of the world’s largest, fastest networks, operating as if it were thousands of miles away from the source’s location. That scale is what keeps so many websites performing quickly under ordinary circumstances — and also what can make glitches reverberate widely. And a failure of a core service — like worker execution, challenge validation, or customer authentication — can cascade through thousands of independent sites that use the same building blocks.
Previous industry events often have two common causes: configuration pushes that accidentally introduce hot spots into the backbone, and influxes of attack traffic that overrun protection mechanisms such as bot detection or rate limiting. Cloudflare’s own reports over the past few years, for instance, have featured DDoS floods that break new records in tens of millions of requests per second — even when primary mitigation remains intact — that can strain edge parts to near their breaking points. Initial wording on the company’s part suggests it may have been more of a surge and less a pure configuration error this time, but the post-incident report will clear up that timeline.
What Cloudflare has said so far about the incident
The company said an unusual surge of traffic was directed at one internal service, and subsequent errors spread to customer traffic. Engineering teams have switched gears and are now working toward clean request handling globally before opening for forensics. Cloudflare has asked customers to follow continuing notes through its status updates and plans a more complete technical write-up on its engineering blog once systems have fully stabilized.
Remaining issues reported by customers include intermittent sign-in issues and/or the requirement to sign in multiple times, as well as occasional protection error pop-ups, such as the following: Antimalware service executable has stopped working. The artifacts tend to disappear as caches are refilled and challenge endpoints recover in all places.
What users and site teams can do during the outage
For end users, hard refreshes are “almost never the answer”; try an alternate network, move from mobile to Wi‑Fi, or open a private window and avoid old sticky session artifacts. If a website is just one challenge prompt away from tearing up, waiting for the recovery window is really the only choice.
You should also check your Cloudflare analytics to see if you’re experiencing increased error rates by colo or service, and temporarily relax strict WAF or bot rules that are triggering false positives so you can reduce your site’s downtime, as well as verify origin health to prevent things from going south.
In some rare situations, when a segment of non-interesting subdomains is paused from proxying, you can restore access for something important, but that’s trading security for availability and should be exercised with caution. Teams should also monitor identity and access policies, as zero-trust gateways may become more sensitive during partial recoveries.
What to watch next as Cloudflare stabilizes services
When it has run down the list of post-mortem details that helps satisfy (or redirect) blame, expect a corporate-tailored Cloudflare heart-on-sleeve explanation of what exactly got triggered, how widespread its effects were, which specific services blew divisions on the airstream, and how things will be different next time. They’ll search for evidence of whether there was a breach from the outside, an internal dependency choke point, or how traffic management and application-layer controls mixed.
The broader conclusion is a familiar one: concentration risk is the price of internet-scale acceleration and security. As goes the edge, so goes the web. What actually matters is how quickly the platform can shed load, segregate the fault, and then prevent replication across the network. By the early indicators, services are being restored to health, but a serious root cause analysis and hardened guardrails will dictate whether this is merely a blip or potentially a blueprint for how to avoid the next cascade.
