A major Cloudflare disruption late Tuesday night blindsided millions of users worldwide, knocking out access to some of the biggest platforms on the internet just as Manila was winding down for the evening. The outage — which rippled across X, Spotify, Canva, OpenAI, Letterboxd, League of Legends, ChatGPT, and countless others — stemmed from an internal network failure inside one of the most critical backbone providers on the web. Handling roughly 20% of global internet traffic, Cloudflare’s stumble instantly translated into a digital chokehold felt across continents.
Cloudflare confirmed that the service interruption began around 6:40 a.m. Eastern Time (7:40 p.m. Manila time), prompting a quick but chaotic scramble across affected sites. Downdetector logged nearly 5,000 outage reports at the peak of the disruption before numbers gradually subsided as services began coming back online. By late evening, most platforms had recovered, but not before users globally reported failed logins, timed-out pages, and app errors across multiple devices.
In a rare, blunt admission, Cloudflare Chief Technology Officer Dane Knecht took to X with a direct apology. “We failed our customers and the broader internet,” he wrote, acknowledging that the internal network problem “impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us.” Knecht said the company has already begun corrective work, promising measures to prevent “this kind of widespread interruption” from happening again. For now, the digital world is back on its feet — but the incident underscored just how quickly a single point of failure can send the entire internet staggering.
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