A significant global outage at internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare on Monday caused a cascade of error messages across swathes of the web, leaving users unable to access popular websites and services.
What Happened During the Outage?
The incident began on Tuesday, 4 January, at approximately 11.20am GMT, when Cloudflare experienced an unidentified problem. The US-based company, which provides critical security and performance services for millions of websites, reported a severe spike in unusual traffic targeting one of its core services.
A Cloudflare spokesperson confirmed the issue, stating, “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11.20am. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors.” This led to a situation where internet users were greeted with error pages instead of the websites they were trying to visit.
Widespread Impact on Major Platforms
The disruption had a tangible effect on high-profile sites. According to data from Downdetector, platforms including X (formerly Twitter) and OpenAI suffered from increased outages concurrently with Cloudflare's technical difficulties.
Beyond public-facing websites, the internet outage also impacted site administrators, many of whom found themselves locked out of their performance dashboards, unable to monitor or manage their own web properties during the incident.
Ongoing Recovery and Investigation
As of 12.21pm GMT, Cloudflare indicated that services were beginning to recover. However, the company cautioned that customers might “continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates” as their remediation efforts continued.
In a subsequent update, the company affirmed they were “continuing to investigate this issue.” The root cause of the initial traffic spike remains unknown. The spokesperson emphasised that the team was “all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors” before turning their full attention to determining the origin of the unusual activity.
This event highlights the critical, yet often invisible, role companies like Cloudflare play in the modern internet's ecosystem, where a single point of failure can have global repercussions.
