It started with a stutter, then a full stop. For millions of people on Tuesday morning, the seamless flow of digital life hit an abrupt, invisible wall. Writers attempting to query ChatGPT were met with blank screens. Social media managers refreshed X, formerly known as Twitter, only to find a void where conversation used to be. Even the tools used to check if the internet is broken — like Downdetector — were, ironically, broken themselves.
The culprit was not a severed undersea cable or a sophisticated state-sponsored cyberattack, but a hiccup in the plumbing of the internet itself: Cloudflare.
On Tuesday, a significant outage at the web infrastructure giant sent cascading failures across the globe, offering a stark reminder of how centralized and fragile the modern web has become. Cloudflare, a company that operates much of the internet’s underlying security and traffic routing, confirmed that a spike in “unusual traffic” had overwhelmed its systems, triggering widespread “500 internal server errors” across a vast constellation of major platforms.
A Ripple Effect Across the Ecosystem
The disruption began just as the U.S. East Coast was logging on for the day. The impact was immediate and democratic in its inconvenience.
Music streams on Spotify cut out mid-song. Graphic designers on Canva found themselves locked out of their projects. Even casual users trying to access Grindr or read film reviews on Letterboxd were greeted by the same cryptic error messages. The scope of the blackout highlighted just how many diverse services rely on a single provider to keep their digital doors open.
The ‘Unusual Traffic’ Spike
In a statement, Cloudflare acknowledged the severity of the incident. “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services,” the company noted in an email. “That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors.”
Engineers at the company were “all hands on deck” to reroute data and stabilize the network. By mid-morning, services had begun to recover, though the company warned that some users might continue to see residual errors as systems normalized.
Crucially, initial indicators suggest this was not a malicious attack. The term “unusual traffic” in this context often points to internal misconfigurations or a specific customer’s service inadvertently flooding the network, rather than a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack by bad actors. However, a full post-mortem will be necessary to understand exactly how a traffic spike in one sector managed to destabilize such a wide array of unrelated services.
The Fragility of Centralization
Tuesday’s incident is the latest in a series of high-profile outages that have plagued the tech industry recently, following closely on the heels of a similar disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS) just last month. Together, these events have reignited a long-standing debate about the centralization of the internet.
For years, companies have flocked to providers like Cloudflare, AWS, and Google Cloud for their efficiency, security, and speed. These services act as the internet’s immune system and traffic controllers, protecting websites from attacks and ensuring content loads quickly. But when one of these central pillars shakes, the entire structure trembles.
Cloudflare handles nearly 20 percent of all web traffic. When it sneezes, roughly a fifth of the internet catches a cold.
