A widespread Cloudflare outage disrupted thousands of websites and services on Tuesday morning, affecting everything from ChatGPT to New Jersey’s transit system.
The internet infrastructure company had largely resolved the issue by 9 a.m. C.T., but said its engineers were still working on some lingering issues.
The disruption highlights how reliant modern digital services have become on a handful of cloud infrastructure providers: When one fails, the ripple effects can be massive.
Cloudflare said it was continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal. The San Francisco-based company protects websites from online threats and improves their performance.
Major platforms experiencing outages included X, Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, and League of Legends. Moody’s credit rating service displayed an Error Code 500, directing users to Cloudflare’s website.
New Jersey Transit warned that parts of its digital services, including njtransit.com, “may be temporarily unavailable or slow to load.” The disruption affected commuters trying to access schedules and ticket information.
However, locally, the Dallas Area Rapid Transit system reported no disruptions due to the Cloudflare outage.
Tuesday’s incident follows a pattern of major cloud service outages. Microsoft deployed a fix last month after Azure infrastructure problems knocked out Office 365 and Minecraft.
Amazon’s cloud computing service experienced a massive outage in October. The failure cascaded across social media, gaming, food delivery, and financial platforms before engineers restored service.
These recurring incidents underscore the vulnerability of the internet infrastructure. As more services migrate to the cloud, single points of failure can have broader impacts.