Half the internet went down! Spotify, ChatGPT, X, and Alza are not working

Today around 12:48 PM our time, a large part of the internet stopped loading. Twitter/X, ChatGPT, betting sites like bet365, the movie database Letterboxd, dating app Grindr, marketplace Vinted, and even Alza.cz – all suddenly displayed an error message. The problem? A global Cloudflare outage, the infrastructure that thousands of the world’s largest websites rely on. And it showed how fragile today’s internet is.

What is Cloudflare and why did it cause chaos

Cloudflare is a company most people have never heard of, but without which half the internet wouldn’t work. It provides infrastructure that protects websites from DDoS attacks, speeds up their loading, and keeps them online even during high traffic. When someone attacks a website, Cloudflare protects it. When millions of people visit the same page at once, Cloudflare ensures the server can handle it.

The problem is that hundreds of thousands of websites today depend on Cloudflare. And when Cloudflare goes down, they all go down at once. This is exactly what happened today around 12:48 PM, when Cloudflare announced: „We are aware of an issue impacting multiple customers.” Which is PR jargon for „half the internet just stopped working.”

What stopped working

The list of affected services was staggering. Twitter/X displayed an error message instead of the home screen. ChatGPT showed a warning message: „Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed” – which made it seem like you had done something wrong, but in reality, it just meant Cloudflare wasn’t working.

The betting site bet365 even accused you of a security threat: „Sorry, you have been blocked. You are unable to access bet365.com.” This scared a lot of people, but the reality was simple – the problem was on Cloudflare’s side, not the users’.

Other affected services included Letterboxd (movie database), Vinted (marketplace portal), Grindr (dating app), dozens of corporate websites, and thousands of smaller pages. The outage was global – reports came from the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, Turkey, India, and many other countries, including the Czech Republic.

Irony: Down Detector was also down

The most absurd part of the entire outage? Down Detector, a website for tracking internet outages, itself went down. When people wanted to find out if only they had a problem or the entire internet, Down Detector showed them a Cloudflare error message. Because yes, even Down Detector uses Cloudflare.

A Reddit thread on r/sysadmin joked: „We need a Down Detector for Down Detector.” Someone found the website isdowndetectordown.com, which – yes, you guessed it – also went down. And even better: Cloudflare’s own status page (cloudflarestatus.com) had display issues. For a moment, it threw a 504 Gateway Timeout ERROR, which is like a fire station being on fire.

One Reddit user joked: „Confirmed, the dinosaur game in the Chrome browser works.” That was probably the only functional thing on the internet during the outage.

What caused the outage?

Cloudflare had scheduled maintenance at its data center in Atlanta. The outage occurred shortly after this maintenance concluded, strongly suggesting that something went wrong during the maintenance. A common scenario: technicians make a change, test it, it looks good, they deploy it to production – and then it turns out it doesn’t work in real-world operation.

Reddit users had their theories. The most common? „Probably DNS.” This is a classic IT joke because DNS (Domain Name System) is responsible for translating web addresses into IP addresses, and when DNS fails, the internet stops working. One comment summarized: „It’s not DNS. It can’t be DNS. It’s definitely not DNS. It was DNS.”

This is not the first nor the last outage

The Cloudflare outage came about a month after a major Amazon Web Services outage, which also took down a large part of the internet. Before that, it was a Microsoft Azure outage. And before that, another Cloudflare outage. The pattern is clear: large internet infrastructures have problems more often than they should.

One Reddit comment summarized: „This is the fourth major internet backbone outage in recent months. Great choice, world – relying on the same services for everything.” Another added: „Lay off more people, that will surely help.”

What to take away from this

Today’s Cloudflare outage is a reminder of how fragile today’s internet is. When one company, which most people have never heard of, experiences problems, half the internet stops working. Twitter, ChatGPT, betting sites, dating apps, marketplaces – all at once.

The problem is that there aren’t many alternatives. Companies could theoretically diversify and use multiple providers, but that’s more expensive and complex. So everyone puts their eggs in the Cloudflare basket and hopes it won’t happen again.

But the reality is, it will happen again. Maybe in a month, maybe in three. And each time it will be a reminder that today’s internet relies on a handful of companies that have too much power. Until something changes, we will regularly see these outages. And in the meantime, you can play the dinosaur game in Chrome – that always works.

Were you affected by today’s Cloudflare outage? What websites couldn’t you load?

Source: Reddit r/sysadmin