Users across the world were back online after widespread disruptions hit Cloudflare, X, Amazon Web Services, and several other major platforms on Tuesday.
The outages, which lasted for more than three hours, affected social media platforms, streaming services, gaming networks, and business tools.
Outage-tracking platform Downdetector reported that OpenAI, bet365, Canva, Spotify, BrightHR, and League of Legends were also impacted during the downtime.
Observations by LEADERSHIP confirmed that X, Cloudflare, and other affected platforms had been restored as of the time of filing this report.
Cloudflare, a major web infrastructure provider, initially announced that it was investigating the disruption and assessing the full impact. By 1:09 p.m., the company said it had identified the cause and was implementing a fix, after which services began returning online across multiple platforms.
Cybersecurity experts said the incident underscored the risks of relying heavily on a small group of centralised cloud providers. Graeme Stuart, Head of Public Sector at Check Point, noted that the Cloudflare outage mirrored recent disruptions involving AWS and Microsoft Azure.
“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 said.
He added that the failures were not the result of individual organisations breaking down but rather “a single layer they all rely on stopped responding.” Stuart warned that although the internet was originally designed to be resilient through distribution, global traffic is now concentrated within a handful of cloud giants, leaving users vulnerable whenever outages occur.
