A massive internet outage hit a range of global digital platforms on Tuesday, leaving millions of users without access to popular services. Affected platforms included X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, Google Cloud, Canva, and several others. Popular gaming titles like League of Legends and Valorant were also impacted, frustrating millions of gamers.
Cloudflare Network Failure Behind the Disruption
The outage was traced back to a major network failure at Cloudflare, a leading web infrastructure company that supports much of the internet’s backbone. Cloudflare acknowledged the issue on their system status page, explaining that they were dealing with an “internal service degradation” affecting several services intermittently.
In a statement, Cloudflare wrote, “We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly.” The company attributed the issue to a “global network problem,” which led to widespread failures across APIs and dashboards.
Impact on Outage Tracking and Online Communities
As the disruption spread, outage tracking site Downdetector reported a sharp rise in complaints, with over 10,000 user-reported service failures before the site itself was rendered inaccessible, also due to the Cloudflare issue.
With major websites and services down, frustrated users turned to alternative platforms like Reddit and Threads to voice their complaints and share memes about the “internet meltdown.”
Conclusion
The outage served as a reminder of how reliant the world has become on key infrastructure providers like Cloudflare, which, despite their best efforts, can occasionally face critical failures that ripple across the digital ecosystem.
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