Cloudflare Bug Takes Chunk of Web Offline

AFP/APP

Paris: Major websites — including social network X and AI chatbot ChatGPT — experienced widespread disruptions after US internet services provider Cloudflare reported it had been hit by a “latent bug”.
Web monitoring site Downdetector flagged outages affecting users of X, the video game League of Legends, and several Google and OpenAI services.
Cloudflare, which handles around 20% of global internet traffic, saw its stock fall 1.5% in early trading.
Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht acknowledged the failure, writing on X: “Earlier today we failed our customers and the broader internet when a problem in Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us.”
He said the issue had been resolved, explaining that “a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change”.The company had earlier pointed to “a spike in unusual traffic” targeting one of its services.
Growing Dependence on Big Infrastructure
The outage echoed last month’s failures at Amazon AWS and Microsoft cloud, which disrupted online services across gaming, businesses and transportation.

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Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey, noted:
“This incident, as with the recent outage at AWS, shows how reliant some very important internet-based services are on a relatively few major players.”
He warned that while large-scale providers offer reach and resilience, their failures carry massive ripple effects.
Strained Systems Under AI Pressure
According to Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne, the Cloudflare failure highlights a wider trend of infrastructure providers going offline more often — and staying down longer.
Cloudflare not only carries a fifth of global traffic but touches a third of the world’s top websites, supporting retailers like Shopify, AI firms including OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as major apps and streaming platforms.
Bourne said, “We’re seeing outages happen more frequently, and they’re taking longer to fix. That’s a symptom of strained infrastructure — increased AI load, streaming demand, and aging capacity pushing systems past the edge.”
AI Boom, Fragile Foundations
Sarah Kreps, director of the Cornell University Tech Policy Institute, said the incident underscored how the global AI race hinges on basic internet plumbing.
“This multi-billion, even trillion-dollar investment in AI is only as reliable as its least scrutinized third-party infrastructure,” she said.
Knecht said Cloudflare would release a detailed explanation of the outage and outline steps to prevent a recurrence before the end of the day.