A global Cloudflare outage briefly impacted access to major websites and online services on Tuesday, causing intermittent failures across platforms including OpenAI, Spotify, X (formerly Twitter), and numerous telecom and media sites. Users reported that pages either would not load or lacked key content, and even Downdetector—which tracks service disruptions—became temporarily unavailable. Cloudflare acknowledged the issue and began gradually restoring service approximately three hours after the problem began.

Cloudflare later confirmed that a crash was triggered by an automatically generated configuration file that ballooned beyond its expected size, overwhelming the software that manages threat traffic. The incident highlighted the dependency many organizations have on content delivery networks (CDNs), which are essential for speeding website performance and mitigating threats but can also create single points of failure when outages occur.

While major outages often spark speculation about cyberattacks, experts emphasize that most disruptions stem from technical or human error, not malicious activity. As more businesses rely on cloud and CDN infrastructures, service interruptions carry growing financial and operational risks, including service level agreement penalties. The outage follows a similar disruption last month caused by Amazon Web Services, underscoring how failures within widely used infrastructure providers can rapidly ripple across the global internet.