Cloudflare outage takes down chunk of internet

A widespread outage affecting internet infrastructure company Cloudflare on Tuesday afternoon (today) temporarily knocked hundreds of websites and apps offline, including social media platform X, Spotify, Letterboxd, and some of the local news and business sites operated by Content House.

The disruption began shortly after 11:30am, when thousands of users reported issues to outage tracker Downdetector. Visitors to affected sites were met with error messages stating that there was an internal server error on Cloudflare’s network.

Cloudflare acknowledged the incident shortly after reports came in, noting it was “aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers”.

Further updates issued earlier today confirmed the company was continuing to assess the cause of the disruption.

Cloudflare is widely used across the internet to improve website performance, protect against cyber attacks, and ensure sites remain accessible during periods of heavy traffic. As a result, even brief outages can have significant ripple effects across global platforms and smaller websites alike.

Today's incident follows a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage last month that brought more than 1,000 sites offline, shortly before Microsoft Azure also experienced problems.