Cloudflare says global outage resolved after implementing fix

Cloudflare said on Tuesday it had applied a fix after a global outage disrupted access to websites and online services around the world.

In an update posted at 7:42pm, the content delivery and DNS provider said it believed the problem had been resolved. It added that teams were continuing to monitor for any remaining errors to ensure services were fully restored.

It later said that some customers may still be experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard. “We are working on a fix to resolve this, and continuing to monitor for any further issues,” it added.

Earlier today, disruptions in internet access were widely reported as Cloudflare reported experiencing issues in its global network.

The outage had a cascading effect, taking down or severely impacting numerous high-profile platforms worldwide, including X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and the AI search engine Perplexity.

Outage extends to Pakistan

In Pakistan, the disruption had directly hit major domestic news portals, including Geo, Samaa, Dawn, and ARY, rendering them inaccessible to many users. This broad impact confirmed the massive dependency of the digital world, from top-tier AI services to local media, on Cloudflare’s core infrastructure.

Technically, a core symptom of this disruption was the failure of Cloudflare’s security challenge features, specifically the CAPTCHA and Turnstile challenges. When a website enables these features for security or bot mitigation, it relies on Cloudflare’s system to function correctly.

Meanwhile, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said it was closely monitoring a major global outage impacting X (Twitter) and Cloudflare.

“PTA is in contact with global platforms and local operators and will continue to observe the situation until services are fully restored,” it added.

Cloudflare first acknowledged the issue on its status page at 11:48 UTC (4:48 PM PKT), reporting an “internal service degradation.”

Users attempting to access affected websites were met with widespread “500 Internal Server Errors,” a common symptom when a website’s underlying infrastructure fails.

The incident also reportedly affected the Cloudflare Dashboard and API, hindering the company’s ability to communicate and resolve the issue immediately.

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Cloudflare said it was addressing a global service degradation. In response to an inquiry, the company confirmed an issue that began at 11:20 UTC (4:20 PKT), stating: “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services… That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors.”

Cloudflare admitted it did not yet know the cause of this unusual traffic spike. The company assured it was fully focused on restoring service and will later investigate the root cause, promising updates on its status and blog pages.

The last month’s Microsoft Azure outage, alongside the current Cloudflare disruption, serves as a stark reminder of the internet’s growing fragility and over-reliance on a few centralised cloud giants.

This comes barely two weeks after a major service disruption hit Amazon Web Services (AWS). The AWS outage (around October 20, 2025) was traced back to a latent bug in an automated DNS management system, which took down thousands of sites globally, from social media apps like Snapchat and Signal to financial services.

An internal configuration error similarly caused the subsequent Azure outage (around October 29, 2025), a faulty change in the Azure Front Door service, that cascaded to impact services like Microsoft 365, Outlook, and Xbox Live for hours.