Cloudflare Outage Explained: What Went Wrong, Why CDN Is Crucial, And Will Disruptions Recur? FAQs Answered

Echoing a disruption similar to that involving Amazon Web Services last month, Cloudflare experienced an outage on Tuesday that led to a brief suspension of services of major websites such as X, ChatGPT and Perplexity.

The internet infrastructure provider had notable issues with its Cloud Delivery Network. The CDN is a network of interconnected servers situated in in various physical locations across the globe, whose job is to make the transmission of content such as web pages, images and videos, a lot faster.

According to that logic, a user in Mumbai, would be able to access a webpage faster when it's in an edge server in the same city rather than an origin server far away.

It also reduces the strain on the origin-server by having the load requests for the requested media distributed across the edge server. It further provides protection against DDoS attacks and security filtering.

Cloudflare reported an "internal service degradation" due to a "spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare's services" leading to errors in the traffic passing through the company's network.

Simply put, the firm's routing layer stuttered leading to difficulties in date being requested reaching the assigned site, which led to a domino effect across Cloudflare's networks, leading to websites not having access to the requested data any longer.

This is similar to a traffic jam (outage) occurring due to issues with a road (routing layer) leading to all the vehicles (data) to slow down one behind the other, resulting in the suspension of services.

This halt in the flow of data caused the outage and caused many websites to show the '500 Internal Server Error'.

Some Indian websites have been affected but the extent of the problem depends on the extent of services using Cloudflare's services. Cloudflare CDN is currently is currently being used by 164,102 e-commerce stores in India, according to Store Leads.

Here is the full list of websites and services that were impacted:

• Spotify

• Perplexity

• X (formerly Twitter)

• OpenAI (ChatGPT)

• Amazon Web Services

• Canva

• Letterboxd

• Archive of our Own

• Genshin Impact

• Honkai: Star Rail

• Sage

• PayPal

• News agency ANI

Unlike Cloudflare's routing layer error, Amazon Web Services had one of its data centres failing. The platform provided compute services which differs from Cloudflare that provides data routing services.

Cloudflare suffered another outage in July 2025, due to internal configuration errors and route-withdrawals.

These kinds of outages may happen more often as data sharing infrastructure gets more centralised, as platforms like AWS and Cloudflare provide the convenience of large network of shared infrastructure. But since the services are coming from a single point of origin, an outage in that shared infrstructure will affect every website that uses it.

Due to growing scale and complexity of data traffic, the need for such centralised services goes up as well, making it harder to safeguard against such roadblocks.