Although the exact causes are still being investigated, early reports indicate that server disruptions caused a massive blackout.
This Tuesday morning was marked by one of the biggest digital disruptions of the year. Thousands of users around the world reported the simultaneous fall of services such as ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), Canva, video game platforms, e-commerce pages and even internal work tools.
The reason behind the digital blackout points directly to cloudflare, one of the key companies in internet infrastructure.
According to official company reports, it all started around 6:40 am, when an “internal degradation of the service” was detected, a problem broad enough to impact global customers.
The trigger would have been an unusual traffic spike recorded near the 11:20 UTC, which overwhelmed systems and caused errors when processing requests within the Cloudflare network. This congestion ended up triggering the wave of failures that affected users of America, Europe and Asia.
Throughout the morning, affected applications displayed everything from 500 errors to messages asking “unblock challenges.cloudflare.com”, a notice that baffled millions of people who were trying to access their favorite platforms normally. Monitoring sites like Downdetector recorded peaks of almost 5,000 reports in just minutes.
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Other servers that failed
The list of affected services was extensive: in addition to ChatGPT, X and Canva, platforms such as Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, League of Legends and multiple corporate sites that depend on the content protection and distribution offered by Cloudflare.
Even some internal systems of the company itself, such as its Dashboard and API, failed during the incident. Although at the beginning there was uncertaintyCloudflare confirmed that it was not a cyberattack, but rather an internal failure generated by that anomalous flow of traffic.
Technical teams began to apply patches and adjustments from the first minutes, which allowed some services to recover their partial operation before noon.
The company also reported that tools like Access and WARP were already reaching normal operating levels.
What is Cloudflare and why is it so important?
Cloudflare is basically one of those silent giants that underpins much of what we use every day. on the internet. It is the network that makes pages load quickly, so that they don’t crash when there is too much traffic, and so that they are protected when someone tries to take them down.
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Its importance is enormous because thousands of platforms, from popular apps to banking services, online stores and social networks, They depend on their infrastructure to function smoothly.
When Cloudflare fails, the blow is felt instantly: half the internet is paralyzed. And that’s when you really notice that, although it goes unnoticed, this company is one of the pillars that keeps life connected. digital of millions of people.
