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 most recent in a string of high-profile web outages.
An Amazon Web Services issue disrupted the every day routines of hundreds of thousands of individuals final month, in some instances stopping them from doing even easy duties like ordering espresso or managing sensible dwelling 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 mix of society’s increased reliance on digital services, the consolidation of essential cloud infrastructure between only a few corporations and the proclivity of individuals to complain about tech mishaps on-line.
It additionally exhibits that nobody, not even main tech corporations, 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 for IT and cybersecurity agency Netscout. Tech disruptions like these are “very, very common problems.”
Cloudflare’s outage was the results of a technical challenge, 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 further particulars in a post on X on Tuesday afternoon. In quick: a routine configuration change triggered 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 techniques 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 laptop 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 extensively felt after they occur on the main suppliers, akin to Amazon, Microsoft and Google, that function the spine of the net.
Issues submitted to Downdetector, an internet site that tracks user-reported issues with well-liked on-line platforms, surpassed 2.1 million on Tuesday, in response to information supplied to NCS by Downdetector dad or mum firm Ookla.
Cloudflare says it handles 81 million HTTP requests – or when net 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 definitely feels like these outages are taking place extra usually, largely due to the size of their influence.
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, advised NCS in an emailed assertion.
Cisco’s community monitoring service has logged 12 main outages in 2025 to this point, in response to 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 around the globe 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 techniques by accident spreading tech failures, techniques that gave the impression to be functioning correctly regardless of silent points occurring and configuration adjustments that cascaded.
While these tendencies aren’t new, Cisco’s weblog put up says it’s been “seeing more of these types of disruptions with more far-reaching consequences.”
And it’ll possible 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.