A technical glitch at Cloudflare caused widespread outages, disrupting platforms with millions of users, including ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify, and X. The company acted quickly to resolve the issue, reporting that services were fully restored within approximately two hours.
Cloudflare officials emphasized that the incident was not caused by a cyberattack. The company’s CTO explained that the root cause was a long-standing, previously undetected “latent bug” within the system. It was triggered during a routine configuration update, leading to a cascading system failure. Cloudflare’s management formally apologized to the public for the inconvenience.
Experts view the incident as a concerning signal. Coming shortly after a similar outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), it highlights how heavily modern internet infrastructure depends on a few key companies. Cloudflare serves roughly 20% of global websites, meaning any technical disruption can potentially cripple the entire digital ecosystem.
