Explainer: Understanding the Cloudflare outage that shook the web

If you were trying to open The Business Standard's website on Tuesday, or refresh one of your favourite platforms, you may have wondered whether your connection had failed.

Pages froze. Apps stalled. Error messages appeared. It felt as if the internet had taken a brief pause. In truth, a key part of its hidden machinery had stumbled.

Cloudflare, a company that supports a vast share of the web behind the veils, experienced a sudden fault that rippled across the world. According to reporting from the Guardian, the disruption began at 11:48am in London and lasted nearly three hours before engineers pushed out a fix.

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare sits deep in the internet's plumbing. It keeps websites secure, shields them from attacks and helps traffic move swiftly across continents. Most users will never see its logo, yet it supports a vast number of sites.

One estimate, cited by the Guardian, suggests that it serves one in five of the world's websites. Its role is so central that even a brief malfunction can ripple across digital life. 

This is what happened during the outage.

What happened?

The problem began with a configuration file that grew larger than expected. Cloudflare explained that the file was automatically generated to manage threat traffic. When it became too large, it caused a crash in a system responsible for handling traffic for several important services.

The malfunction did not only affect ordinary users trying to open pages. It also stopped some website owners from accessing their performance dashboards. During the same window of time, Downdetector reported increased disruptions for X, OpenAI and other major platforms.

As engineers rushed to diagnose the fault, Cloudflare disabled an encryption tool called Warp for users. The company warned that people trying to connect through Warp would find the service unavailable. 

A spokesperson also issued an apology "to customers and the internet in general", promising to study the incident and improve practices. By 2:48pm, the company announced that the fix was in place and that it believed the problem was resolved. It continued to monitor the system for any remaining errors.

Why does this matter?

To understand why this event mattered, it helps to look again at what Cloudflare is. The Guardian describes it as a global cloud services and cybersecurity firm. It runs datacentres around the world and protects websites, apps, APIs and email systems.

Cloudflare filters malicious activity, blocks billions of threats daily and ensures that digital traffic moves at a steady pace. Professor Alan Woodward of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security described it as a gatekeeper, because it checks whether traffic is safe and whether users are human. When a company with this level of responsibility falters, even briefly, the effects surface quickly.

It filters malicious activity, blocks billions of threats daily and ensures that digital traffic moves at a steady pace. Professor Alan Woodward of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security called it "the biggest company you have never heard of". He also described it as a gatekeeper, because it checks whether traffic is safe and whether users are human.

When a company with this level of responsibility falters, even briefly, the effects surface quickly. The outage touched many well known names. 

According to reports gathered by Downdetector — a platform that tracks outages of services, Bet365, League of Legends, Sage, YouTube and Google all experienced issues around the same time.

The link was not always direct, but the timing reflected how the health of the internet is tied to the health of a few infrastructure providers.

This incident also fed into a wider debate about digital resilience. Much of the global economy depends on the smooth function of cloud platforms. Banking, retail, education and communication rely on them.

Yet a handful of companies now carry the weight of this infrastructure. Cloudflare is one. Amazon's AWS, Microsoft's Azure and Google Cloud are others.

Recent outages across these networks have raised concerns among experts who argue that the internet has developed a "dependency chain". If one of these firms experiences a problem, large parts of the web can slow or stall.