Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Internet Worldwide

Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare was hit by an outage on Tuesday, knocking several major websites offline for global users.

E-commerce platform Shopify, job search engine Indeed, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, President Donald Trump’s Truth Social and Elon Musk’s social media platform X were among the sites impacted by the Cloudflare issues, according to Downdetector, which itself could not be accessed briefly for some users. Some of NJ Transit’s digital services were brought down by the outage.

OpenAI’s status page indicated ChatGPT and its Sora short-form video app had fully recovered after they experienced issues due to a “third-party service provider.”

A Cloudflare spokesperson said the “root cause” of the outage was an automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic that “grew beyond an expected size of entries,” which triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for several of its services.

There’s no evidence that the outage was a result of an attack or caused by malicious activity, the spokesperson added.