A technical glitch at Cloudflare caused widespread disruption on Tuesday, bringing down several major platforms, including X, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude. This incident highlights how dependency on a single provider can ripple across the tech ecosystem, a phenomenon seen multiple times this year.
Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht clarified that the outage was not due to a cyberattack but stemmed from a hidden software bug in a core system responsible for bot checks. Because this system is interconnected with other parts of Cloudflare’s network, the issue quickly escalated, affecting numerous websites and applications. Knecht stated that the company will release a detailed explanation soon, noting that a routine configuration change triggered the latent bug, which cascaded into a broader network failure.
Similar large-scale outages have occurred recently. Last month, Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a defect in its automated DNS system, disrupting platforms like Snapchat, Reddit, WhatsApp, and Fortnite for up to 15 hours. Shortly after, Microsoft Azure experienced DNS-related issues, impacting Microsoft 365, Xbox Live, Minecraft, and several airlines and retail services. These incidents underscore the vulnerability of the internet to single points of failure.
