Cloudflare experienced a massive outage on Tuesday, knocking dozens of major websites offline and briefly exposing millions of users to privacy risks. The company, which provides web security, speed, and routing services for millions of sites, connects users to websites and applications through its vast global network, meaning when Cloudflare goes down, a huge portion of the internet fails with it. Issues began around 6:48am ET, affecting services including X, Spotify, OpenAI, Uber, and Grindr, according to outage tracker Downdetector.
Cloudflare acknowledged the disruption, describing it as an internal service degradation that may intermittently impact some services, and confirmed that a fix was underway. Experts have warned that outages at centralized internet providers do more than cause inconvenience but also create moments of exposure for users' private data. Rob Jardin, Chief Digital Officer at NymVPN, said: 'For the average internet user, an outage like this is more than just an annoyance; it's a moment of exposure... Your real physical location (IP address) and the list of every website you try to visit (DNS queries) can be briefly exposed to anyone watching, including hackers or surveillance systems.'
Graeme Stuart, head of public sector at Check Point, explained that the outage was not due to individual site failures but because 'a single layer they all rely on stopped responding,' highlighting how concentrated web traffic into a handful of providers can create massive security risks. The outage underscores a growing concern in internet infrastructure, as when a single centralized company holds the keys to much of the web, a technical problem instantly becomes a privacy and security problem for millions of people worldwide. Cloudflare runs a huge network of servers spread across more than 330 cities in over 120 countries.
These servers help websites load faster, stay secure and handle traffic smoothly. Its system is extremely powerful, handling massive amounts of data and connecting to more than 13,000 internet networks, including the biggest internet providers, cloud services, and major companies around the world. The outage stems from the Cloudflare Global Network, a distributed network of data centers that connects users to websites and applications, making them faster and more secure.
Downdetector received tens of thousands of reports since the outage began, with impacted users experiencing issues with server connections, websites and hosting. Many users have reported error messages when clicking links on the web, with alerts showing an 'Internal server error' and blaming the issue on a local Cloudflare data center. Stuart said: 'Cloudflare going down today sits in the same pattern we saw with the recent AWS and Azure outages.'
'These platforms are vast, efficient and used by almost every part of modern life.' 'When a platform of this size slips, the impact spreads far and fast and everyone feels it at once.'
Stuart explained to Sky News that the reported outages did not occur because each organization failed on its own, but because 'a single layer they all rely on stopped responding.' 'Many organizations still run everything through one route with no meaningful backup. When that route fails, there is no fallback. That is the weakness we keep seeing play out,' he said.
'The internet was meant to be resilient through distribution, yet we have ended up concentrating huge amounts of global traffic into a handful of cloud providers.'
Jardin said: 'When internet infrastructure providers like Cloudflare go down, it doesn't just disrupt sites that rely on it: it can pose serious privacy risks for users.' 'The infrastructure of the web is becoming intimately interwoven, and even momentary disruptions to centralized companies reverberate across the board.' He offered an example of a user texting with a friend and the person managing the phone network can see who the user and what they're doing.
'That's essentially what happens. Your real physical location (IP address) and the list of every website you try to visit (DNS queries) can be briefly exposed to anyone watching, including hackers or surveillance systems,' Jardin continued. 'This is a clear example of why we can't afford to put all our digital eggs in one basket. When a single, centralized company holds the keys to so much of the internet, a problem on their end instantly becomes a problem for everyone's privacy and security. 'The solution isn't just better security for those big companies - it's building a new foundation where no single point of failure can compromise the anonymity of millions of people.'