Cloudfare outage: X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Perplexity AI among apps, websites down

A major technical issue at Cloudflare disrupted access to a wide range of websites and services, beginning around 11 AM. Users worldwide reported difficulties accessing platforms such as X, Spotify, ChatGPT, Canva, and Perplexity, with many seeing error messages and loading failures. By evening, outage reports surged into the thousands on Downdetector. Cloudflare plays a critical role in internet infrastructure, managing DNS, content delivery, and protection from DDoS attacks for many popular platforms.

Any interruption in Cloudflare’s services has a broad and immediate impact. Cloudflare confirmed the outage caused widespread 500 errors across its network, as well as failures on its dashboard and API tools.

Users attempting to load affected sites encountered the message, "Cloudflare cannot load the page." This error was seen on several major platforms, including X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Letterboxd, Bet365 and others.

The disruption drew significant attention as users of X, Spotify, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT experienced direct impacts. OpenAI stated, "ChatGPT is down and investigations are in progress." Although OpenAI did not explicitly confirm whether the incident was directly caused by Cloudflare, the timing of the outage across multiple platforms suggested a common root.

Cloudflare stated it was still investigating the issue and would provide more information as soon as it understood the full impact. Many users continued to experience sporadic service interruptions as investigations continued.

Cloudflare reported that some services were recovering, but warned users could still encounter high error rates as systems stabilised. No precise timeline for full restoration was given at this stage.

A wide range of platforms felt the effects of the outage. The most significantly impacted included X, Spotify, OpenAI platforms including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Canva, Letterboxd, Bet365, League of Legends, Sage, and Downdetector itself, which experienced partial failure.

Among the other apps that are experiencing issues are Perplexity AI and Google Gemini.

Downdetector, which tracks online service outages, also relied on Cloudflare and at times struggled to load. When available, it recorded a spike in user reports for affected platforms. The message "Cloudflare cannot load the page." became a common experience for users across different services, highlighting the interconnected nature of today's internet infrastructure.

Cloudflare indicated that some services were showing signs of recovery. However, continued high error rates were expected until the underlying technical problems were fully resolved. The incident drew comparisons to previous large-scale outages at other major cloud providers, underscoring the dependency many online services have on shared infrastructure.