Shopify, Indeed, ChatGPT, Truth Social, X and more disrupted as one of the world’s largest web infrastructure providers scrambles to restore stability
MARKET INSIDER – A major outage at Cloudflare—the internet infrastructure giant powering roughly 20% of the global web—triggered widespread service disruptions on Tuesday, taking down some of the world’s most heavily used websites and apps. The blackout rippled across e-commerce, social media, AI platforms, and public services, underscoring just how dependent the modern internet has become on a handful of critical cloud providers.
Shopify, Indeed, Truth Social, X (formerly Twitter), Anthropic’s Claude, and even outage-tracking service Downdetector all experienced failures, according to early reports. OpenAI confirmed that ChatGPT and its new Sora video app were impaired by issues originating from “a third-party service provider.” NJ Transit warned that some digital services were down “due to a vendor.”
Cloudflare said the disruption began around 6:20 a.m. ET, when the company detected a “spike in unusual traffic” targeting one of its services. The surge triggered network errors across traffic routed through Cloudflare’s systems. “We do not yet know the cause,” a company spokesperson said. “We are all hands on deck.” The firm issued an update at 9:22 a.m. ET saying engineers were “continuing to work on a fix,” as its shares fell more than 3% in early trading.
The sudden outage highlights the quiet fragility of the global internet. Cloudflare doesn’t just accelerate website performance—it protects servers from DDoS attacks and ensures uptime for millions of businesses. Any disruption to its systems can cascade across sectors, much like the AWS outage last month and the Microsoft Azure and 365 global failure that followed. Last year, a botched CrowdStrike software update triggered one of the largest IT outages in recent memory, grounding flights and delaying hospital procedures.
The world is increasingly reliant on a small number of digital gatekeepers—and today’s outage is another reminder of how quickly a single point of failure can break the internet.
