A widespread service disruption today impacted a host of major platforms, including X, Canva, OpenAI and Spotify. User complaints began rolling around five hours ago, with the vast majority of users citing inability to access the platforms.

By 06:50 a.m., the outage tracking site Downdetector had already logged more than 7,000 reports. The issue appears linked to Cloudflare, a critical infrastructure provider known for its content delivery network and distributed DNS services. Cloudflare is widely used by website owners to manage high traffic loads and defend against cyber threats like DDoS attacks and comment spam.

Cloudflare has officially acknowledged the widespread disruption, stating that it is investigating a critical issue affecting numerous clients. The company confirmed that users are facing “widespread 500 errors,” with significant failures also hitting the Cloudflare Dashboard and API.

“We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem,” the company noted, promising further updates soon.

The glitch has knocked out several high-profile platforms, with reports indicating that services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity, X, Spotify and Gemini have all been impacted by the outage.

The disruption was so severe that it even knocked out Down Detector, the primary tool users rely on to track such outages, as it also depends on Cloudflare’s infrastructure. Once the site eventually recovered, data revealed a sharp surge in error reports across major platforms, including Spotify, Canva, X and ChatGPT.

The Cloudfare disruption arrives barely a month after a similar breakdown at Amazon Web Services, which triggered widespread chaos online. The AWS glitch knocked out major players like Reddit, Snapchat and Fortnite. These repeated failures have reignited the debate over the stability and risks of centralising so much of the web’s infrastructure in the hands of just a few providers.

- Agencies