Cloudflare suffered a widespread outage on Tuesday that temporarily knocked several major platforms offline, including ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify and Elon Musk’s X. The disruption, which lasted for hours, highlighted once again how much of the internet depends on a handful of core infrastructure providers.
Service has now been restored.
During the outage, users around the world reported failures loading websites and accessing apps routed through Cloudflare’s network. X, which was also affected, drew extra attention because its CEO Elon Musk had mocked AWS last month during a separate outage that hit the encrypted messaging app Signal.
“Messages on X chat are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange ‘AWS dependencies,’ so I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head,” Musk posted earlier — a message that ironically couldn’t be viewed by many at the time because X was inaccessible.
Signal president Meredith Whittaker, responding on Bluesky, used the moment to underline a broader concern: the internet’s growing reliance on a few hyperscale providers.
“The question isn’t ‘why does Signal use AWS?’” she wrote. “It’s… how we got to a place where there’s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers.”
Cloudflare said on its status page that the underlying issue had been identified and a fix was rolled out. By mid-day, most affected services were coming back online.
The company has not yet disclosed the root cause of the outage.
