A major Cloudflare outage today disrupted internet access across a broad swath of websites and services worldwide, including OrbitalToday, which was down during the incident. The outage started around 11:20 UTC and lasted until approximately 14:30 UTC, causing widespread HTTP 500 errors and connectivity problems for users trying to reach Cloudflare-reliant sites.
Among the hardest hit were social media giants like X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, which experienced intermittent to widespread service interruptions, frustrating millions of users worldwide. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a critical AI conversational tool, was also impacted, alongside popular platforms including Canva, Spotify, Dropbox, and gaming service League of Legends. Even Downdetector, a site that tracks outages, suffered downtime itself during the event.
The root cause has been identified by Cloudflare as an unusual spike in traffic to one of its services coinciding with scheduled maintenance in several data centers including Atlanta and Los Angeles, which exacerbated infrastructure overload. The company affirmed that the issue was not due to cyberattack but a network and traffic management challenge. Approximately 19 Cloudflare data centers experienced issues, leading to partial or total service interruption in regions as diverse as North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Cloudflare’s technical teams worked rapidly to implement a fix, restoring most services by 14:30 UTC, though residual error rates and recovery efforts persisted briefly afterward. The company apologized for the disruption, emphasizing the critical role it plays in internet infrastructure and vowing to improve resiliency to prevent future incidents.