Cloudflare outage knocks out X, ChatGPT and major websites worldwide

MUMBAI: A sweeping internet hiccup rattled the digital world on Tuesday as Cloudflare, the heavyweight behind much of the modern web’s plumbing, faltered and dragged scores of popular platforms down with it. Users across continents were slapped with 500 errors, frozen dashboards and stalled apps, as sites from X to ChatGPT buckled at once.

Cloudflare said it was aware of an issue affecting multiple customers and was investigating the cause. Early checks pointed to widespread failures across its dashboard and API. The company said it was working to understand the full impact and mitigate the problem, promising further updates.

Later in the day, the firm said services were beginning to recover but warned that customers might still see higher-than-normal error rates while remediation continued. Engineers, meanwhile, kept digging into the source of the disruption.

The scale of the outage showed just how deeply Cloudflare sits under the global internet. Its DNS, CDN and security tools keep thousands of businesses online, meaning a wobble at its end cascades across the web. By 4.30pm IST, the impact was visible everywhere: users struggled to load posts on X, generate designs on Canva or run AI tools like ChatGPT. Even online games such as League of Legends saw players locked out.

Among the worst-hit services were:
Twitter (X)
Spotify
Canva
Shopify
OpenAI
Garmin
Claude
Verizon
Discord
TMobile
AT&T
League of Legends

For now, the web is largely back on its feet, though engineers are still elbow-deep in diagnostics. The internet may be vast, but when one pillar shakes, the whole structure feels the tremor. Today it did. And how.