Internet Firm Cloudflare Hit by Outage

If your lunchtime doomscroll on X (formerly Twitter) suddenly froze, stuttered, or generally threw a tantrum today, you’re not alone, thousands of users have reported that a whole bunch of websites have gone a bit wobbly thanks to an issue at internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare.

Reports started shortly after 11.30am today (Tuesday), with people all over the place complaining that X, Canva and other services had stopped behaving themselves.

And because this is the internet, the complaints arrived within seconds.

Cloudflare confirmed something was indeed up, posting on its service status page at 11:48am to say it was ‘aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers’.

Translation: yes, it’s broken, no, we don’t know why yet.

By just after noon, the company was still digging for answers, adding that further updates would follow ‘as more information becomes available’. So far, not much more has been said.

The disruption has been wide enough that even Isle of Man Today has been hit by the glitch, bad news for anyone trying to catch up on local happenings over a sandwich.

Today’s hiccup comes hot on the heels of last month’s Amazon Web Services outage, which took more than 1,000 websites and apps offline and reminded us all that the internet really does run on a handful of extremely stressed servers somewhere far away.