Cloudflare Outage Knocks Major Websites Offline – Including X and Key Marketing Tools

Highlights:

• Major Cloudflare outage disrupted access to X, ChatGPT and other high profile platforms worldwide

• SEO and marketing tools, including Ahrefs, were reported down or severely slowed, stalling workflows

• Cloudflare says the “incident is now resolved”, although monitoring continues as services stabilise

Cloudflare Outage Knocks Major Websites Offline, Including X

A major Cloudflare outage today caused widespread disruption across the internet, taking platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT and a long list of other services partially or completely offline for users around the world.

The incident affected Cloudflare’s role as a key web infrastructure provider that handles a significant share of global traffic. As the problems spread, users reported pages failing to load, feeds stalling and error messages tied to Cloudflare’s network.

By mid afternoon, Cloudflare confirmed that a fix had been deployed and that systems were recovering. On its status page and through media updates, the company said the “incident is now resolved”, while warning that some services might still see intermittent issues as traffic normalises.

Impact on Major Platforms and Everyday Users

The outage hit during busy weekday hours and quickly became visible on social media, where users struggled to access X, music and video platforms, AI tools and news websites.

Monitoring services such as Downdetector logged thousands of problem reports focused on X, as people encountered connection errors, frozen timelines and login issues linked to Cloudflare’s infrastructure.

For many users, the issue looked at first like a local broadband problem. Only once reports began to stack up did it become clear that a central piece of internet infrastructure was at fault.

SEO and Marketing Tools Caught in the Crossfire

The disruption was felt strongly across the digital marketing and SEO community. Popular platforms that rely on Cloudflare to manage traffic and protect their applications experienced downtime or severe degradation.

Users reported that tools such as Ahrefs were unavailable or extremely slow while the incident unfolded, which left agencies and in house teams unable to run audits, check rankings, pull backlink data or generate client reports. Other analytics, tracking and SaaS platforms used by marketers were also affected as requests routed through Cloudflare returned errors.

For organisations that plan reporting, pitches and campaign launches around specific time slots, even a short interruption can push deadlines back and force teams to reschedule work.

What Cloudflare Says Happened

Cloudflare has indicated that the outage was triggered by a spike in unusual traffic that caused errors for some traffic passing through its network.

Engineers moved to deploy fixes and stabilise affected services. Within a few hours, the company said that its systems were operating again, with engineers continuing to monitor for residual issues and investigate the root cause.

There is currently no firm indication that the event was the result of a cyber attack. Early expert commentary has pointed instead to the fragility of large scale infrastructure and the complexity of global networks that sit behind many of the world’s biggest websites.

A Reminder of How Dependent the Web Has Become

Cloudflare underpins millions of websites through DNS, security and performance services. When a provider of that size experiences a fault, the impact is immediate and widely felt.

Today’s outage follows other high profile incidents in recent years that have involved Cloudflare and rival providers. Each event raises familiar questions about resilience, redundancy and the risks of concentrating so much internet traffic in the hands of a small number of companies.

As services return to normal, businesses and marketing teams are now working through backlogs, rerunning failed reports and checking that scheduled activity executed correctly while the outage was in progress. The incident is likely to renew internal discussions about fallbacks, continuity planning and how teams cope the next time a major piece of the internet stumbles.