Cloudflare has confirmed that a major service disruption on Tuesday — which temporarily knocked major platforms like ChatGPT, X, Shopify, Dropbox, and League of Legends offline — was not caused by a cyberattack.
The outage, which also affected digital services used by public agencies such as New Jersey Transit, New York City Emergency Management, and France’s SNCF railway, sparked widespread speculation after Cloudflare reported detecting “unusual traffic.”
Internal Software Bug Behind Widespread Disruption
Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht clarified that the outage was caused by an internal issue rather than malicious activity. According to Knecht, a latent bug in a system that supports Cloudflare’s bot-mitigation technology triggered a cascade of failures after a routine configuration update.
The glitch caused significant degradation across Cloudflare’s global network, disrupting numerous customer platforms.
“That issue, the impact it caused, and the time to resolution is unacceptable,” Knecht said, adding that steps are already being taken to prevent similar incidents.
Timeline of the Incident
Cloudflare’s status page shows:
- 11:48 UTC: Investigation into the outage began
- 14:42 UTC: Initial fix deployed
- Errors continued to appear for several hours afterward as systems recovered
The company said a full post-incident report is forthcoming.
No Evidence of Cyberattack
Cloudflare routinely blocks massive DDoS attacks, including record-breaking events that exceed tens of terabits per second. Because of this, some users initially suspected that a large-scale cyberattack was responsible.
However, Cloudflare emphasized that breaching its global network would require an extraordinary level of skill and resources — far beyond typical hacktivist capabilities. Still, experts note that it’s not uncommon for threat groups to falsely claim responsibility for high-profile outages.
Cloudflare CEO Calls It Company’s Worst Outage Since 2019
In an update later in the day, Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince provided additional context, describing the incident as the most severe outage Cloudflare has experienced since 2019.
The company plans to release a detailed postmortem outlining the root cause and the steps being taken to reinforce its infrastructure.
