Cloudflare disruption has hit major sites. But it’s not the worst outage in recent years

The global outage has affected major websites including X, ChatGPT and Letterboxd

A global outage at web infrastructure firm Cloudflare on Tuesday left major internet platforms inaccessible worldwide.

Visitors to websites such as X, formerly known as Twitter, ChatGPT and film reviewing site Letterboxd saw an error message that indicated that Cloudflare problems meant that the page could not show.

Cloudflare is an internet infrastructure that offers many of the core technologies that power today’s online experiences. That includes tools that protect websites from cyber attacks and ensure that they stay online amid heavy traffic, for instance.

“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers,” the company said in a new update. “Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”

It is the second major disruption this year, after Amazon’s AWS cloud services unit malfunctioned in October.

Here are some of the biggest tech outages in recent years, in chronological order:

British Airways

Shares in British Airways owner International Airline Group fell by up to 10% in early trading on Friday (James Manning/PA) (PA Archive)

IAG-owned British Airways was hit by a major computer system failure in May 2017 that stranded 75,000 passengers over a holiday weekend, sparking a public relations disaster and pledges from the carrier that it would do better in future.

According to media reports, the blackout was caused by a maintenance contractor who accidentally switched off power.

Alphabet

Some of Google's most popular services including YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive were down for an hour during an outage on 14 December, 2020.

According to outage monitoring website DownDetector, more than 12,000 YouTube users were affected in various parts of the world, including the United States, Britain and India.

Fastly

Thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe were hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to US-based cloud company Fastly (Getty)

In June 2021, thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe were hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to US-based cloud company Fastly.

The issue affected several high traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and the New York Times with outages ranging from a few minutes to around an hour.

Akamai

Websites of dozens of financial institutions and airlines in Australia and the United States were briefly down on 17 June, 2021, due to server-related glitches at content delivery network provider Akamai.

According to the firm, the problem was caused by a bug in its software.

Meta

Meta said the outage was caused by a faulty configuration change.

Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went dark for six hours on 4 October, 2021, with 10.6 million users reporting problems worldwide.

The company said the outage was caused by a faulty configuration change.

X Corp

Social media platform Twitter suffered a major outage on 28 December, 2022, leaving tens of thousands of users globally unable to access the popular social media platform or use its key features for several hours before services appeared to come back online.

Downdetector tracked more than 10,000 affected users from the United States, about 2,500 from Japan and about 2,500 from the UK at the peak of the disruption.

Crowdstrike

A blue Windows error message caused by the CrowdStrike software update is displayed on a screen in a bus shelter (Getty Images)

A software update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered systems problems for Microsoft customers that resulted in hours-long global computer systems outages on 19 July, 2024.

Services from airlines to healthcare, shipping and finance were impacted globally.

After the outage was resolved, companies were left dealing with backlogs of delayed and cancelled flights and medical appointments, missed orders and other issues that took days to solve.

AWS

Amazon's cloud services unit, that hosts applications and computer processes for companies around the world, was hit by an outage (Reuters)

Amazon's cloud services unit, that hosts applications and computer processes for companies around the world, was hit by an outage on 20 October, 2025, disrupting operations across multiple industries around the world and taking down several popular apps including Reddit and Snapchat.

The disruption knocked workers from London to Tokyo offline and halted others from conducting normal everyday tasks like paying hairdressers or changing their airline tickets.

It was at least the third time in five years that AWS's northern Virginia cluster, known as US-EAST-1, contributed to a major internet meltdown.

Cloudflare

Grab from the DownDetector.co.uk website following the outage (DownDetector.co.uk/PA)

The web-infrastructure firm, whose network handles about a fifth of web traffic, was hit by an outage preventing thousands from accessing major internet plaftorms including X and ChatGPT on 18 November, 2025.

Cloudflare said in a 11.48am update it was "experiencing an internal service degradation". In a 2.42pm update, it said it had implemented a fix for the underlying issue, adding that "the incident is now resolved".