A significant outage at Cloudflare today disrupted access to internet services worldwide, exposing the extent to which global web traffic relies on a single provider.

The event began at 11:48 UTC, with Cloudflare reporting an “internal service degradation” that led to widespread HTTP 500 errors affecting users and administrators alike.

Edge provider failure impacts exchanges and web3

The outage hit a broad range of services, including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Slack, Coinbase, Perplexity, and Claude.

Many crypto and exchange users found themselves unable to access platforms, with error messages and failed dashboard logins.

Even outage tracking sites relying on Cloudflare struggled to report on the incident, making the scope of the disruption harder to assess in real time.

For the bitcoin community, this event underscores the risk of relying on centralized infrastructure for decentralized protocols.

Despite the bitcoin network’s high uptime, access to exchanges was interrupted because of a single edge provider failure.

As Cloudflare serves around 19% of all websites, any technical issue quickly cascades across the digital economy.

Centralized bottlenecks remain a security concern

Cloudflare’s CTO, Dane Knecht, acknowledged:

“I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet.”

He cited a latent bug in their bot mitigation service that led to the cascading failure, emphasizing this was not a cyberattack.

Recovery and lessons for bitcoiners

By the afternoon, most services had recovered, with Cloudflare stating:

“A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”