Cloudflare experienced a global outage early on Tuesday, cutting access to platforms including ChatGPT, X, and Spotify for many users, as the internet infrastructure company worked to restore services after detecting a surge of unusual traffic on its network.
Beginning around 6:40 a.m. ET, many users attempting to access a range of websites and online services reported receiving error messages across multiple browsers and apps, suggesting a wider problem in Cloudflare’s traffic-verification layer.
Cloudflare provides security, routing, and content delivery services for websites that account for around a fifth of global web traffic.
The outage coincided with scheduled maintenance at data centers around the world, including U.S. cities such as Los Angeles and Atlanta, as well as locations abroad such as Santiago, Chile, and Tahiti. These maintenance operations involved temporarily rerouting traffic away from the specific sites, which experts say can cause latency issues.
Although the global outage overlapped with scheduled work at several of the company’s facilities, Cloudflare has not confirmed that the maintenance activities were responsible for the outage, nor has it identified the origin of the unusual traffic surge.
“We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC,” Cloudflare said in an email statement. “That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. While most traffic for most services continued to flow as normal, there were elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services.”
While the disruption on Tuesday was significant, it is not currently being treated as a confirmed cyber-attack. Analysts, including Alan Woodward, a professor at the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security, have said that the scale and architecture of Cloudflare make a targeted breach doubtful, as such a large service is unlikely to have a single point of failure.
Cloudflare representatives say the outage appears to have originated with usual traffic patterns within their own network. As of the time of publication, Cloudflare has not reported any evidence of a security breach or malicious attack. Response efforts are currently focused on restoring service and identifying the cause of the traffic spike, rather than following post-breach disclosures.
A Similar Pattern
Over the past few months, similar disruptions have occurred across the web, raising questions about whether these large-scale outages are linked to malicious activity.
Cloudflare’s outage arrived less than one month after an Amazon Web Services failure on October 20, 2025, when an issue inside AWS’s US-EAST-1 region disrupted access to hundreds of websites and apps. AWS traced the issue to a malfunction in its internal monitoring layer, which created a chain reaction that slowed or blocked traffic across its network.
The AWS outage was determined not to have resulted from malicious activity, mirroring current perspectives on this week’s Cloudflare outage, both of which were marked by stalled services, pages refusing to load, and platforms that depended on these sites dropping offline in clusters.
On October 24, 2025, Microsoft also reported its Azure DDoS Protection service mitigated what it called the largest DDoS attack ever recorded. Microsoft said the traffic originated from the Aisuru botnet, a Turbo Mirai-class network of compromised home routers and cameras tied to a growing number of attacks. Had the attack been successful, users would have experienced timeouts across a range of unrelated applications, followed by global downtime reports.
Presently, Cloudflare representatives have said the company remains focused on accelerating the recovery of its infrastructure, as the investigation into what may have caused Tuesday’s odd traffic spike continues.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the company’s statement on Tuesday read. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
“After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the usual spike in traffic,” the company’s statement added.
Marie Nicola is a journalist, pop culture historian, and former CBC Senior Producer whose investigative research explores the intersection of culture, technology, and history. She has contributed to the Globe and Mail, collaborated with Reddit, and been featured in TrendHunter as an early innovator in streaming and digital broadcasting. Follow her on X @karmacakedotca.