Cloudflare blames massive internet outage on ‘latent bug’

A large portion of the internet briefly went dark on Tuesday morning after a widespread outage at Cloudflare disrupted access to major platforms, including ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify, X, and more.

Cloudflare acknowledged the issue around 8 a.m. ET on its status page, saying it had identified the root cause and was rolling out a fix. By mid-morning, the company reported that the incident had been resolved, though it continued to monitor for any remaining errors.

Around that time, Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht shared an explanation on X, attributing the disruption to a latent bug buried deep in one of Cloudflare’s core systems.

According to Knecht, the bug — part of a service supporting Cloudflare’s bot-mitigation tools — crashed after a routine configuration update. That unexpected failure triggered a cascade across Cloudflare’s network, resulting in widespread slowdowns and outages. Knecht emphasised that the incident was not the result of an attack.

“We failed our customers and the broader internet today,” he wrote, adding that the company is committed to ensuring it “does not happen again.” Knecht also said a full technical breakdown is coming “in a few hours.”

Cloudflare later noted that some users may still have trouble logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard as lingering effects are addressed. The company says it is working on a fix and will continue to monitor for further issues.

This outage arrives less than a month after a significant disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS), underscoring just how concentrated the internet’s infrastructure has become. When one of these key providers falters, the effects ripple across the web instantly.

Cloudflare powers an estimated 20% of all websites, with data centres in over 330 cities and direct connections to 13,000 networks, including every major ISP and cloud provider. Among its core offerings is DDoS protection, which made Tuesday’s events all the more ironic, as Cloudflare itself struggled to stay online.