What is Cloudflare? Internet giant linked to the outage that hit Twitter, ChatGPT, Canva and other platforms

A major internet outage yesterday briefly disabled many major online platforms, including popular online games such as X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Perplexity, Canva, Letterboxd, and League of Legends. The incident quickly brought attention to Cloudflare, the web infrastructure company whose services underpin millions of websites around the world.

DownDetector, which aggregates real-time outage reports, detected a sharp increase in user complaints last night. The outage was caused by an unexpected issue linked to Cloudflare’s support portal provider, but the issue quickly evolved into a broader service failure affecting numerous websites connected to the Cloudflare network.

Why is Cloudflare’s Role Important?

Cloudflare provides essential tools that help websites stay secure and responsive, protect them from cyber attacks, manage heavy traffic, and improve loading speeds. The company acts as an intermediary between users and website servers; This means that any malfunction on its side could instantly affect a large portion of the internet.

Since Cloudflare usually works behind the scenes, its failure becomes especially noticeable during an outage. Yesterday, users on affected platforms encountered a series of error messages that completely blocked access, including server failures and prompts such as ‘Please unblock Challenges.cloudflare.com to continue’.

Even Truth Social, the platform associated with Donald Trump, had trouble loading for many users. The widespread nature of the issues led many to directly attribute the outage to Cloudflare’s network issue.

Cloudflare Responds to Outage

In an initial statement, Cloudflare confirmed that it was investigating an issue that caused extensive 500-level errors and even affected its own control panel and API tools. The company stated that it is evaluating the full scope of the fault while working on a solution.

A later update noted that systems were gradually improving, although some customers noticed high error rates during the stabilization process. Late in the evening, Cloudflare announced that its services had largely returned to normal and most of the affected websites had resumed full functionality.

Services Back Online

As of now, the outage has been resolved and major platforms are operating normally again. But the incident underscores the internet’s dependence on infrastructure providers like Cloudflare and how quickly a single point of failure can spread throughout the digital ecosystem.