A major outage at Cloudflare caused widespread internet disruption on Tuesday, affecting access to numerous global platforms including X, Facebook, Spotify, Canva, Letterboxd, OneSignal and others.

The company confirmed it was investigating “global networking issues” linked to a significant service interruption.

Users attempting to access websites supported by Cloudflare were met with error messages indicating that the service could not load pages due to “internal server errors” within Cloudflare’s network. Reports of outages surged on monitoring platforms, with Down Detector briefly impacted by the same issue before displaying a sharp rise in user complaints.

In a statement issued at 11:48 UTC, Cloudflare acknowledged the problem: “Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers. Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.” The company also reported technical issues affecting its support portal, warning customers they might encounter errors when viewing or responding to support cases.

“Our support portal provider is currently experiencing issues,” Cloudflare said. “However, customer inquiry responses are not affected. Users can still reach Cloudflare via live chat through the Cloudflare Dashboard or the emergency phone line.”

Cloudflare added that it was coordinating with its third-party provider to determine the cause and scope of the disruption. “More updates to follow shortly,” the company noted.

As one of the largest content delivery and security networks online, Cloudflare plays a critical role in global internet traffic, handling an average of 81 million HTTP requests per second across millions of websites. The outage therefore created a cascading effect across numerous services relying on its infrastructure.

Down Detector indicated that sites potentially affected included X, Facebook, Spotify, Canva and Grindr. The outage also triggered widespread “500 errors” and failures in the Cloudflare Dashboard and API, according to a later update from the company.

Cloudflare had previously scheduled maintenance at its Santiago data center between 12:00 and 15:00 UTC, though it remains unclear whether the maintenance was connected to the outage.

By 12:21 UTC, Cloudflare reported signs of improvement: “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”

Service stabilization efforts were ongoing as the company worked to restore full functionality across its network. (ILKHA)