On Tuesday afternoon, Cloudflare’s CTO, Dane Knecht, apologized to the online community.
In the aftermath of an outage that affected the internet landscape, Knecht took to X to address the matter, offering his regrets. He remarked, “I’ll be straightforward: earlier today we let down our customers and the larger Internet when an issue in the @Cloudflare network disrupted significant amounts of traffic that rely on our services. The websites, businesses, and organizations that depend on Cloudflare count on our availability, and I apologize for the repercussions we caused.”
His apology further elaborated: “The problem, the effect it had, and the time it took to resolve are intolerable. Efforts are already in motion to ensure it doesn’t recur, but I understand that it caused real distress today.” Knecht also provided an update regarding the outage on X, assuring a comprehensive explanation of the root cause would be forthcoming.
On Tuesday morning, the Cloudflare outage led to a wide array of services, applications, and websites becoming inaccessible for numerous users. Downdetector reported user-submitted issues involving X, ChatGPT, Canva, Spotify, League of Legends, DoorDash, Claude, Uber, and YouTube. Even Grindr experienced a temporary outage. (Note: Downdetector is a subsidiary of Ziff Davis, the parent company of Mashable.)
In a statement sent via email to Mashable on Tuesday morning, Cloudflare clarified that the issue stemmed from a failure in a software system responsible for managing traffic for many clients.
“To clarify, there is no indication that this resulted from an attack or was due to any malicious behavior,” the statement noted. “We anticipate that some Cloudflare services will experience brief degradation as traffic naturally increases following the incident, but we expect all services to normalize within the next few hours. A thorough explanation will be available soon on blog.cloudflare.com. Given the critical nature of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is inexcusable. We sincerely apologize to our customers and the Internet as a whole for our failure today. We will take lessons from this incident and make improvements.”
If this internet disruption seems reminiscent, it’s because it marks the third significant outage in 2025. Just last month, there was a widespread outage affecting Amazon Web Services. Prior to that, a Google Cloud Platform outage similarly impacted extensive sections of the internet.