Major Cloudflare outage took down ChatGPT, X, and Spotify Tuesday - here's what happened

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• A Cloudflare issue took many websites offline.
• Affected sites include X, ChatGPT, and more.
• The outages are eerily similar to ones earlier this year.

It wasn't just you, another internet outage took down some of your favorite sites this morning. As of 10 a.m. ET, Cloudflare said "a fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved."

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Just before 7 a.m. ET, reports spiked that users were having trouble accessing X. Other sites, including the popular game League of Legends, ChatGPT, and Spotify were also down. Users quickly connected the dots and figured out all of those sites use Cloudflare to make their sites faster, and, ironically, more reliable.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

By 9 a.m. ET, there were more than 330,000 global reports of Cloudflare being down and 267,000 for X.  

Eerily similar

While not as widespread, the outages seem eerily similar to earlier this year when hundreds of sites went offline due to Cloudflare problems, and similar to the massive CrowdStrike outage last year. This wasn't just an American problem either, as reports are flooding in from all across the globe. More than 38,000 US users reported an issue with Cloudflare (that's just the ones that took time to send in a report), while 35,674 users in Great Britain reported a problem. 

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Even downdetector.com, a popular site for tracking outages that's owned by ZDNET parent company Ziff Davis, was down for a time. When I tried to access it this morning to assess how widespread the problems were, I got a message that said, "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed."

Cloudflare is investigating

Cloudflare confirmed the issue on its system status page, saying, "Investigating -- Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly." 

The company added in later updates that it's "continuing to investigate this issue," but it didn't offer a potential timeline for resolution. At 9:34 a.m. ET, the company said it had "deployed a change which has restored dashboard services," but it was "still working to remediate broad application services impact." 

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Shortly before 10 a.m. ET, X appeared to be functional again. Earlier in the morning, I had gotten a message saying, "Internal server error Error code 500 Visit cloudflare.com for more information."