Cloudflare announced on Tuesday afternoon that it has resolved an issue that earlier disrupted access for multiple customers, including popular platforms such as X and League of Legends. The resolution was confirmed at 2:30 p.m. EST, with the company stating, “Cloudflare services are currently operating normally. We are no longer observing elevated errors or latency across the network.”
Earlier in the day, there was a surge in reports regarding outages and difficulties accessing various apps and websites. Cloudflare’s system status page indicated that the company was actively investigating the issue, which resulted in customers experiencing widespread 500 errors—an indication that a website’s server is malfunctioning.
A spokesperson for Cloudflare explained, “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors.” Although the cause of this unusual traffic spike remains unclear, Cloudflare emphasized that they were diligently working to ensure their network operated without errors.
Thousands of users reported challenges accessing X and League of Legends, according to data from internet outage tracking site Downdetector. Despite Cloudflare’s efforts to rectify the situation, reports of difficulties persisted until around 10 a.m. EDT.
The incident at Cloudflare follows a series of outages affecting major web services, including a glitch in June that disrupted access for well-known companies like Google, OpenAI, and Spotify. This latest disruption raises concerns about the reliability of critical online services. Notably, it comes on the heels of significant outages at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in recent weeks, further emphasizing the vulnerabilities present in today’s internet infrastructure.
Mehdi Daoudi, co-founder and CEO of Catchpoint, an internet reliability company, remarked, “This is the third outage in just over a month, with Amazon Web Services and Azure both facing similar issues just weeks ago. Each of these outages has had cascading effects, disrupting other platforms relying on their services and costing billions of dollars.” He highlighted the fragility of online infrastructure, where many companies depend on a limited number of providers.
The disruptions were compounded by reports of users receiving messages such as “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed,” which prevented them from accessing services. Other apps reported to have faced issues included Spotify, ChatGPT, and even Downdetector itself.
Despite the outages, Cloudflare reassured customers that inquiries from their clients remain unaffected, and business and enterprise clients can reach the company for assistance via live chat through the Cloudflare Dashboard or their emergency telephone line. This proactive communication aims at maintaining trust and clarity with customers during service disruptions.