New Delhi: A major outage at Cloudflare disrupted access to several global platforms on Tuesday, leaving thousands of users in India and abroad unable to load websites or refresh their feeds.
The disruption affected platforms such as X, Perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT, and other services that rely on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
Global Outage Hits Major Platforms
Users across India and many other countries reported that X (formerly Twitter), owned by Elon Musk, was not loading properly. According to Downdetector data, complaints surged sharply over the last 24 hours.
The most common problems reported were with the feed (44%), the website (30%), and server connections (27%). While desktop users were heavily affected, mobile apps experienced relatively fewer issues. The disruption was not limited to X. Platforms like Perplexity and Gemini also displayed error messages linked to Cloudflare’s failure.
Cloudflare Confirms Technical Fault
Cloudflare, one of the world’s biggest internet infrastructure providers, confirmed it was experiencing a technical issue that affected many of its customers.
The company said on its status page that it was investigating widespread 500 errors along with outages in its dashboard and API. The outage coincided with scheduled maintenance at Cloudflare’s Santiago (SCL) data centre, though it has not confirmed whether the two are connected.
Why Cloudflare’s Failure Causes Massive Disruptions?
Cloudflare is a critical layer of the modern web. It works as a content delivery network and security shield, helping websites load faster, stay online during heavy traffic, and defend against cyberattacks.
When Cloudflare experiences problems, thousands of websites and apps can slow down or go offline at once. That is why platforms relying on its network– including X, ChatGPT, Letterboxd, and several global services– saw widespread connectivity issues throughout the day.
Key functions provided by Cloudflare include:
- Content delivery network
- Protection against DDoS attacks
- Web application firewall
- SSL/TLS encryption
- DNS and load balancing
- Caching and traffic management
- Developer tools and analytics
It also supports public-interest initiatives like Project Galileo, which protects arts and human rights organisations, and Project Athenian, which safeguards election websites.
Cloudflare said that they had fully restored its services after the outage caused by an automatically generated configuration file, designed to manage potential security threats.
The global outage highlights how dependent the modern internet is on a few major infrastructure providers and how a single fault can ripple across millions of users worldwide.
