Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Major Websites, Including X, League of Legends, and ChatGPT

A widespread technical issue at web services provider Cloudflare caused disruptions across multiple major websites and online platforms early Tuesday, prompting a surge in outage reports from users around the world.

Cloudflare confirmed on its system status page that it was investigating an issue affecting “multiple customers,” with many sites experiencing 500 internal server errors, a common indicator of server malfunction. The company said it was seeing signs of recovery but warned that users “may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates” as remediation efforts continued.

The outage affected a wide range of services, including X (formerly Twitter) and the popular video game League of Legends, according to the outage tracking site Downdetector. Ironically, Downdetector itself briefly went offline due to its reliance on Cloudflare’s infrastructure before recovering within minutes.

Cloudflare’s stock fell Tuesday as reports of disruptions spread. The company, which provides security and performance services for web applications, has strong ties to generative AI leader OpenAI and plays a role in securely connecting users to ChatGPT and other cloud-based tools. Cloudflare recently introduced new options for website owners to block AI crawlers from accessing their content.

Additional technical updates posted by Cloudflare noted that “WARP access” was temporarily disabled in London but restored shortly after. While the company has not released details confirming the root cause of the outage, scheduled maintenance at its Santiago (SCL) data center was planned for the same time period.

As of late morning, Cloudflare reported steady progress in restoring operations, though some websites continued to display intermittent 500 error messages. The company said it remains in a “red alert” posture while engineers work to fully resolve the issue.

The outage marks yet another multi-platform disruption tied to a single infrastructure provider, highlighting the broad impact such incidents can have across the internet ecosystem.