A major outage affected large parts of the internet Tuesday morning after a widely used infrastructure company, Cloudflare, experienced technical issues. The outage disrupted services for a range of platforms, including ChatGPT, “League of Legends,” New Jersey Transit, X (formerly Twitter), Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, and Moody’s credit ratings website. Moody’s displayed an Error Code 500 and directed users to Cloudflare for updates.
Cloudflare reported at 10:40 a.m. EST that engineers were still mitigating lingering problems but had implemented a fix and continued to monitor the situation. The company, based in San Francisco, acts as a content delivery network (CDN), handling content from about 20% of the world’s websites and distributing it across thousands of servers globally. This infrastructure is designed to make internet access faster and safer by routing user requests through Cloudflare’s servers rather than directly connecting to websites.
The outage also impacted digital services for New Jersey Transit and some New York City emergency systems, causing slow or unavailable online services. Authorities said they were monitoring the situation and responding to disruptions as needed.
Cybersecurity experts note that while CDNs like Cloudflare are intended to protect websites from traffic overload and improve response times, their central role means that issues can cause widespread internet disruptions.
This incident follows other recent outages involving major tech companies. In May, Microsoft’s Azure cloud portal experienced an outage affecting Office 365, Minecraft, and other services due to a configuration change. In October, Amazon’s cloud computing service also went down, affecting a broad range of online platforms, including social media, gaming, and financial services.