Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Thousands, Affects Transit Systems, ChatGPT, X and Other Services
A leading internet infrastructure provider announced that it has largely restored service after a widespread outage that began early Wednesday morning and affected millions of users worldwide. The company said the disruption was traced to a routing anomaly within its network, which was corrected after several hours of intensive troubleshooting.
During the interruption, popular platforms such as the AI chatbot ChatGPT, the online game League of Legends, and the social media service X experienced slowdowns or temporary unavailability. In addition, several public transit applications that rely on the provider’s content delivery network reported delayed updates, causing inconvenience for commuters in major cities across North America and Europe.
Cloudflare, which supplies security, performance, and reliability services to a broad range of websites and applications, plays a critical role in keeping internet traffic flowing smoothly. Its global network of data centers routes and optimizes billions of requests each day, making any service interruption especially noticeable for end‑users and businesses that depend on low‑latency connections.
Company officials said the issue stemmed from a misconfiguration that triggered an unexpected cascade of traffic rerouting. "Our engineering teams identified the root cause and implemented corrective measures to restore normal operations," a spokesperson said. Independent cybersecurity analysts noted that such incidents, while rare, highlight the inherent complexity of large‑scale internet infrastructure and the importance of redundant pathways.
Looking ahead, the provider indicated it will conduct a post‑mortem review and roll out additional safeguards to reduce the likelihood of similar events. Users and partner services are expected to resume normal activity as the network stabilizes, and industry observers will be watching closely for any longer‑term implications for internet reliability.
