A major failure at Cloudflare — one of the world’s largest content delivery and security networks — triggered widespread disruptions across the internet, affecting millions of users. Starting around 12:30 PM, platforms such as X, ChatGPT, and the popular game League of Legends began suffering significant service interruptions as the outage spread.

By 12:48 PM, Cloudflare confirmed that it was dealing with an “internal service disruption,” warning that multiple services could experience intermittent issues.

At first, many websites and apps were partially accessible, but as the outage continued, users were met with error screens. ChatGPT, for example, displayed a message reading: “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to continue.” Other services, including the RAE website, simply showed “internal error” notices, pointing to Cloudflare’s interconnection hub as the root of the problem.

Downdetector reports that several other major platforms were affected as well, including Grindr and Canva. Ironically, even some outage-monitoring tools themselves struggled due to the same Cloudflare failure.

This incident follows recent outages from Redsys and Amazon, adding to a month of instability across major tech infrastructures. Cloudflare has since stated that it identified the source of the problem and began restoring its services — including Warp (its free VPN) and Cloudflare Access.

At 2:35 PM, the company issued another update confirming that teams are actively working to bring all affected applications back online.

Cloudflare’s influence is enormous: it powers routing, hosting, and cybersecurity services for hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide, with 38% of Fortune 500 companies among its 295,000 paying customers. In Spain, the company has gained public attention in its conflict with LaLiga over anti-piracy enforcement, which has previously led to temporary blocks of Cloudflare-hosted sites during football matches.

With outages like this becoming more frequent, using a reliable VPN is increasingly important to maintain access, bypass regional disruptions, and stay online when major networks fail.