Parts of the internet experienced major disruption on Tuesday after a widespread technical problem at Cloudflare caused multiple high-traffic websites — including X (formerly Twitter) and film-review platform Letterboxd — to stop working.
Users attempting to access these platforms were met with error messages indicating that Cloudflare’s network was unable to load the requested pages.
Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest internet infrastructure providers, offers essential services that keep websites online, protect them from cyberattacks, and manage traffic surges. Any disruption in its systems can trigger widespread outages across the internet.
In an update, the company acknowledged the issue:
“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers. Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”
Outage-tracking platform Down Detector also faced difficulties due to the same technical problem, but when accessible, it displayed a sharp spike in user-reported outages.
Many affected users saw a message reading:
“Internal server error on Cloudflare’s network. Please try again in a few minutes.”
The disruption temporarily made X (Twitter) and several other websites unavailable for a large number of users worldwide as Cloudflare continued investigating the root cause.
