Having issues with your favorite websites currently? It’s not simply you.
Web infrastructure supplier Cloudflare skilled a disruption on Tuesday that briefly impacted a swath of on-line providers – from Spotify to ChatGPT and even President Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform – marking the newest in a string of high-profile web outages.
An Amazon Web Services issue disrupted the day by day routines of tens of millions of individuals final month, in some instances stopping them from doing even easy duties like ordering espresso or managing good residence home equipment. Just days later, Microsoft’s Azure service was hit with an outage.
According to consultants, it’s an indication of the occasions – a mixture of society’s increased reliance on digital services, the consolidation of essential cloud infrastructure between only a few firms and the proclivity of individuals to complain about tech mishaps on-line.
It additionally exhibits that nobody, not even main tech firms, are resistant to tech malfunctions.
“It really almost doesn’t matter how well-situated the provider is in these cases, or even how sophisticated the IT organization and infrastructure is for a private business,” mentioned Eileen Haggerty, space vice chairman of product and options advertising and marketing for IT and cybersecurity agency Netscout. Tech disruptions like these are “very, very common problems.”
Cloudflare’s outage was the results of a technical situation, not a cyberattack or malicious habits, the corporate mentioned in an announcement to NCS.
The firm mentioned the outage was brought on by a “configuration file” that was meant to handle “threat traffic.”
“The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services,” the assertion mentioned.
Dane Knecht, chief expertise officer at Cloudflare, shared extra particulars in a post on X on Tuesday afternoon. In quick: a routine configuration change precipitated a bug to crash, which “cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services.”
“Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today,” he wrote.
The Amazon outage equally involved a bug, which kicked off when two automated methods tried to replace the identical information concurrently.
IT outages are comparatively frequent, tech consultants say. Twenty years in the past, it was typical for IT providers to down “all the time,” mentioned Mike Chapple, an IT professor on the University of Notre Dame and former pc scientist for the National Security Agency.
“It would not be unusual to go a week at work having at least one outage of some IT service,” he mentioned, noting that now everybody depends on the identical massive suppliers.
The impacts will be broadly felt after they occur on the main suppliers, akin to Amazon, Microsoft and Google, that function the spine of the online.
Issues submitted to Downdetector, an internet site that tracks user-reported issues with widespread on-line platforms, surpassed 2.1 million on Tuesday, in line with information offered to NCS by Downdetector mum or dad firm Ookla.
Cloudflare says it handles 81 million HTTP requests – or when internet browsers want sure information to set off an motion, akin to loading a webpage – per second on common.
That there have been three widespread outages in lower than a month is a coincidence. But Haggerty acknowledged that it actually feels like these outages are occurring extra usually, principally due to the dimensions of their affect.
The variety of service outages has “remained consistent,” however the “number of sites and applications dependent on these services has increased, making them more disruptive to users,” Angelique Medina, head of web intelligence for Cisco ThousandEyes, informed NCS in an emailed assertion.
Cisco’s community monitoring service has logged 12 main outages in 2025 up to now, in line with a timeline published on its website, not counting Tuesday’s Cloudflare disruption.
That compares to 23 in 2024, 13 in 2023 and 10 in 2022. A sweeping Crowdstrike outage upended companies, flights and hospitals all over the world in 2024.
There are some frequent tendencies between outages that occurred within the first half of 2025, according to Cisco. A string of outages have been linked to methods by accident spreading tech failures, methods that seemed to be functioning correctly regardless of silent points occurring and configuration modifications that cascaded.
While these tendencies aren’t new, Cisco’s weblog publish says it’s been “seeing more of these types of disruptions with more far-reaching consequences.”
And it’ll seemingly occur once more.
“They aren’t something you’d say, ‘Well, thank God that would never happen to us,’” mentioned Haggerty. “All of these could actually happen to any business.”
NCS’s Hadas Gold contributed to this report.