Cloudflare Confirms Investigation as 500 Errors Spread
In an update on its status page, Cloudflare noted: “Cloudflare is aware of and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers. Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing. We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem.”
Hours later, the company said it was “seeing services recover”, but warned that users might continue to experience higher-than-normal error rates while remediation efforts continued.
The outage rapidly rippled through the digital ecosystem, affecting some of the world’s most used platforms. Users on Elon Musk’s social network X reported blank feeds, frozen timelines, and repeated “Something went wrong” messages. Reports flooded DownDetector, with users confirming sudden service interruptions across multiple geographies.
Perplexity AI, Google’s Gemini, and several other AI-driven platforms also faced significant disruptions, triggering error prompts linked directly to Cloudflare’s infrastructure failures.
OpenAI Confirms ChatGPT Outage
OpenAI’s status portal confirmed that ChatGPT and some associated services were down. While OpenAI did not officially link the downtime to Cloudflare, error messages seen by users clearly aligned with Cloudflare-related failures. The outage also affected traffic to OpenAI’s API and developer tools.
Websites Reported Down During the Outage
Based on user reports and platform confirmations, the following services were among the most impacted:
- X (formerly Twitter)
- Spotify
- OpenAI services including ChatGPT
- Gemini (Google AI)
- Amazon Web Services components
- Canva
- PayPal
- Letterboxd
- Sage
The cascading impact highlights the central role Cloudflare plays as an intermediary layer that accelerates and protects online traffic. Even a brief failure can disrupt large sections of the internet simultaneously.
Why Cloudflare Outages Are So Impactful
Cloudflare functions as a global network that sits between websites and users, optimizing speed while protecting against cyberattacks. Because thousands of companies rely on its CDN, DNS, and security layers, any internal malfunction can cause large-scale disruptions across unrelated platforms.
The incident follows several high-profile outages in recent months. Last month, both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services faced major downtimes that affected multiple digital services worldwide. Earlier in June, a Google Cloud outage disrupted apps like Google Meet, Discord, and Spotify.
Experts note that the increasing concentration of internet infrastructure among a few major players makes widespread outages more common. For additional context, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) also tracks global digital disturbances on its official portal: MeitY.gov.in.
What Happens Next?
Cloudflare says it is continuing diagnostic and recovery efforts. Users may still experience intermittent issues until the network stabilizes completely. Companies relying on Cloudflare have begun issuing their own advisories, assuring customers that services will resume as soon as the root cause is fully addressed.