Mystery outage triggers widespread breakdown of popular sites

A major outage at Cloudflare on Monday caused popular platforms like X, Spotify, and ChatGPT to go offline for users around the world.

The disruption began around 6 a.m. ET, when people started receiving Internal Server Error messages and repeated HTTP 500 errors while attempting to access various sites.

Cloudflare acknowledged the problem on its System Status page and said it was dealing with an internal service degradation that was affecting multiple services.

Cloudflare provides content delivery networks, cybersecurity tools, DDoS mitigation, and wide area network services to thousands of clients across the globe, making any interruption to its systems widely felt.

The outage quickly spread across major consumer sites and corporate platforms, with Facebook, AWS, bet365, Canva, BrightHR, and League of Legends among those reporting access problems, according to tracking site Downdetector.

Downdetector itself also experienced technical issues during the incident, adding to the confusion among users trying to determine the scope of the disruption. Cloudflare said it is still assessing the situation and has not yet confirmed the underlying cause.

The company noted that scheduled maintenance was underway at one of its data centers but did not clarify whether the activity was tied to the system failure.

Cloudflare said more information will be released as the investigation progresses.