Why X, ChatGPT, others suddenly became inaccessible

Abdullateef Fowewe

A massive global outage at Cloudflare disrupted a large swath of the interneton Tuesday, causing widespread service failures across some of the most popular online platforms.

The incident quickly emerged as a glaring reminder of the internet’s heavy reliance on a few key infrastructure providers.

Within an hour of the outage onset, more than 11,000 problem reports flooded in from the United States and nearly 4,000 from the UK, demonstrating the breadth and impact of the disruption.

Notable services affected included X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, PayPal, Uber Eats, Canva, League of Legends, and Downdetector.

Affected users encountered pervasive HTTP 500 Internal Server Errors alongside 502 and 503 server errors, as websites either failed to load or became inaccessible.

In addition to customer-facing disruptions, Cloudflare’s own critical services including the Turnstile CAPTCHA system, administrative dashboard, and API experienced outages, further hampering both users and developers.

The event exposed critical vulnerabilities in global internet architecture, highlighting how a failure at a single service provider can cascade across thousands of dependent sites and applications worldwide.

Cloudflare has confirmed that recovery operations are underway for its Access and WARP services.

The company is actively investigating the root causes while working to restore normal functionality.