A significant technical disruption at Cloudflare, the critical internet infrastructure firm responsible for speeding up and securing an estimated 20% of the world’s websites, triggered a major global outage on Tuesday, rendering high-profile platforms like X and OpenAI's ChatGPT inaccessible to millions.

The widespread failure began around 11:20 a.m. UTC when the company’s internal network suffered an “internal service degradation.”

Cloudflare spokespersons confirmed the issue stemmed from an “unusual spike in traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services,” which resulted in a cascade of HTTP 500 server errors—a generic signal of a server-side problem—across the globe.

The disruption's impact was immediate and far-reaching, hitting essential services including Spotify, Canva, Discord, and various cryptocurrency exchanges.

In a stark demonstration of the web’s deep interdependencies, even the outage-tracking site Downdetector was briefly affected.

Cloudflare engineers temporarily disabled certain tools, including its WARP secure connectivity service, in key regions such as London as part of remediation efforts.

By early afternoon, the company reported seeing services recover, though it cautioned that elevated error rates might persist.

This incident marks the latest in a series of high-profile cloud outages, following recent major disruptions at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

The recurrence of these cascading failures has intensified scrutiny on the extreme centralization of the modern internet.

Experts argue that when a foundational provider like Cloudflare falters, the resulting global digital gridlock exposes the inherent risks of relying on a handful of key companies for core web functionality.