Chaos hit the internet this morning when Cloudflare broke at the worst possible time and dragged huge platforms down with it.
The outage first began around 6:00 AM ET, when the company’s support portal provider started “experiencing issues,” according to what Cloudflare posted on its own status page.
The timing lined up with a planned maintenance window at the company’s SCL (Santiago) data center, but Cloudflare didn’t say that this was the cause. What users saw was simple: pages failed, feeds wouldn’t load, and error screens took over the internet.
Tracking outages across major platforms caused by Cloudflare
The platforms hit were big names. People on X complained they could not refresh posts. Gamers trying to play League of Legends or Valorant saw reports pile up on downdetector.
Even the Cloudflare status page itself began breaking down around 7:03 AM ET, losing its CSS styling while the company said its team was “continuing to investigate this issue.”
The official wording earlier at 6:48 AM ET said the company was aware of a problem that “potentially impacts multiple customers” and that more information would come later.
Users trying to work found themselves blocked from random corners of the internet. Anyone loading Canva ran into problems creating or saving content. People trying to access OpenAI bumped into messages telling them to “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed,” which also stopped access to ChatGPT.
That message spread across many websites at once because the security layers Cloudflare normally uses to protect them were not working, even though the websites behind them stayed online.
People online tried to figure out if the error screens meant they were blocked. They were not. The Cloudflare tools that usually filter traffic were the part breaking, not the users. The outage came fast, broke things fast, and hit global platforms at the same time, which is why the impact felt huge.
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