A significant outage at Cloudflare, one of the internet's largest networks, caused widespread disruptions on Tuesday morning, leaving thousands of users across Canada and beyond unable to access popular platforms like X, Spotify, and Shopify.
Widespread Service Disruptions Reported
Thousands of users of the social media platform X, owned by tech billionaire Elon Musk, found the site would not load. According to a Reuters report cited by the National Post, the issue began in the early hours of the morning. The outage tracking website Downdetector recorded a significant spike in reports, with 12,075 user complaints about X as of 8:37 a.m. Eastern Time.
The problem, however, was not isolated to X. Data from Downdetector indicated that other major online services were also experiencing difficulties. Affected platforms reportedly included OpenAI, Spotify, the dating app Grindr, Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, and the online game League of Legends, suggesting a problem with a core internet service provider.
Cloudflare Identifies the Cause
The source of the disruption was quickly traced back to Cloudflare, a company that provides critical infrastructure for millions of websites worldwide. In a statement posted online just before 7 a.m. ET, Cloudflare acknowledged it was “experiencing an internal service degradation.”
The company assured users that its team was focused on restoring service but warned that customers might continue to see “higher-than-normal error rates” during the remediation efforts. A spokesperson for Cloudflare provided more detail to Business Insider, explaining that they noticed “unusual traffic” for one of their services beginning around 6:20 a.m. ET.
Restoring Service and Investigating the Spike
Cloudflare confirmed that a fix for the issue was identified just after 8 a.m. ET and was being implemented. The company stated its immediate priority was to ensure all web traffic was served without errors. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic,” the Cloudflare spokesperson told Business Insider.
This incident highlights the critical role companies like Cloudflare play in the modern internet ecosystem. As noted by Business Insider, Cloudflare is used globally to protect websites against hackers, filter fake traffic, and improve page loading speeds. When its services are degraded, the effects ripple across a vast number of popular websites and online services that depend on its network.
