Global Internet Outage: What Caused the Disruption Affecting Millions?

Major Internet Disruption Hits Multiple Platforms

On Tuesday, a significant internet outage affected numerous global digital services, leaving countless users unable to access platforms such as X, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, Google Cloud, and Canva.

The outage also disrupted popular gaming titles like League of Legends and Valorant.

The root cause of this disruption has been identified as a major network failure at Cloudflare, a company that provides essential web infrastructure for a large portion of the internet.

According to Cloudflare's system status page, the company reported, "Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly," attributing the issue to a "global network problem" that resulted in widespread API and dashboard failures.

Outage tracking platform Downdetector recorded a dramatic increase in reports, with over 10,000 complaints logged for various service interruptions before the site itself faced loading issues, ironically becoming another casualty of the Cloudflare outage.

As users encountered blank screens, many turned to alternative platforms like Reddit and Threads to express their frustrations and share humorous takes on the "internet meltdown."

"My entire staff portal and sites are using Cloudflare, so everything is down," one user lamented, while another humorously noted the timing of the outage occurring just after maintenance.

"With Cloudflare down, and nearly all of my frequently visited websites and mobile banking services also affected, it seems unwise for these companies to rely solely on one cybersecurity provider," another user remarked.