A massive Cloudflare outage is taking half the internet offline. Major services like Google, Amazon Web Services, Discord, Twitch, YouTube, OpenAI, and many others are experiencing significant disruptions.
On its status page, Cloudflare confirmed they are facing a “widespread” outage affecting several of their key services. This aligns with thousands of reports pouring into DownDetector, where users have been flagging issues since shortly after 1 p.m. Central Time. According to Cloudflare, they are investigating what appears to be an authentication failure, which remains unresolved at this time.
And yes, the number of people reporting problems is no small matter. So far:
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Over 27,000 Spotify users have reported issues with music not loading or suddenly stopping.
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More than 9,900 reports about Google services, including issues with Google Meet, Drive, Maps, Nest, and Gmail.
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Discord received over 10,000 complaints about connection errors and outages.
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Snapchat wasn’t spared either: about 3,000 users said they couldn’t access the app.
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Twitch saw more than 2,800 reports, and even games like Rocket League and Pokémon TCG were mentioned among the affected.
So if you noticed nothing was working properly this afternoon, don’t worry—it wasn’t your WiFi. It was one of those cascading outages that reminds us how much we rely on the cloud… and on everything being properly connected.
What Is Cloudflare and Why Do We Notice So Much When It Goes Down?
Cloudflare might not be a household name unless you're deep into the tech world, but trust me—when it fails, half the internet feels it. Why? Because it's one of the largest providers of what's known as CDNs (Content Delivery Networks).
So, what’s a CDN and why does it matter? Here’s a simple explanation: every time you visit a website, use an app, or stream a video, you’re requesting data from a server that could be on the other side of the planet. And the farther away that server is, the slower everything can get—pages take longer to load, videos buffer, or you might not even be able to access the content.
That’s where CDNs come in. They distribute that data (websites, videos, apps, etc.) across many servers located all over the world. So when you visit a site, instead of fetching data from the U.S. or Japan, for example, the system pulls it from a server much closer to you. The result: faster loading times and fewer issues.
Cloudflare doesn’t just speed up the internet; it also protects many websites from attacks and manages services like DNS (you might have heard of 1.1.1.1) and even offers its own VPN called Warp. It's essentially a full package of speed and security for many of the sites we use daily.
So what happens when Cloudflare goes down? A bunch of websites and services stop working or perform poorly, because they heavily rely on its infrastructure. We’re talking big names like Dropbox, Discord, Shopify, Reuters, Garmin, IBM, and many more.
That’s why when Cloudflare has a bad day, it feels like the entire internet is broken (even though it's really just that many sites depend on it to reach us).
This story is currently developing...