A major technical issue at internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare has caused widespread disruption across the internet, affecting numerous high-profile platforms including the social media site X, OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot, Spotify and many websites worldwide. 

Cloudflare, a crucial provider of network and security products that supports an estimated 20% of all websites worldwide, confirmed it was grappling with an internal service degradation. Users began reporting issues on monitoring sites like Downdetector this Tuesday.

Company Acknowledgment and Recovery Efforts

In an update issued earlier today, Cloudflare acknowledged the problem, stating:

"Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, [with] Dashboard and API also failing."

The company later confirmed that the issue had been identified and a fix was being implemented as of 8:47 AM ET. While services are beginning to recover, Cloudflare cautioned customers in a status update that they:

"may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts."

This warning suggests that some platforms may still experience intermittent issues as the company works to fully restore stability.

The Scope of the Disruption

The outage has affected services that rely on Cloudflare for functions like "edge computing," protecting against cyberattacks, and managing high traffic. Affected sites may display an error message indicating an "internal server error on Cloudflare's network," and request that users “try again in a few minutes.”

The Fragility of the Modern Internet

This incident follows recent major outages, including one that impacted Amazon Web Services last month, knocking more than 1,000 sites and apps offline, and subsequent issues that affected Microsoft Azure.

Experts suggest that these recurring events highlight the fragility of the modern internet and the profound disruption that can be caused by problems at the small number of companies that provide essential infrastructure. When a key internet hub like Cloudflare, which is fundamental to global web traffic and security, experiences technical difficulties, the ripple effect is immediate and widespread.

The company said that services are starting recover, but customers may continue to see "higher-than-normal errors rates" as it continues to investigate the problem.