Cloudflare is down due to a major outage in its systems, which has caused many of the world’s biggest websites to stop loading properly and display error messages instead.

What Happened

• On Tuesday morning, websites like X (formerly Twitter) and others showed errors from Cloudflare, indicating a problem with the company's infrastructure.

• Cloudflare acts as a middleman between users and websites, providing resilience against high traffic and cyberattacks, but this means an issue with Cloudflare can take many sites offline simultaneously.

Why It Matters

• Cloudflare supports millions of internet properties and is a critical part of web infrastructure, making issues highly disruptive.

• The outage has been attributed generally to errors within Cloudflare’s own systems, although specific technical details may not be public yet.

• Similar outages have occurred with infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Services, highlighting the interconnectedness of modern web services.

Websites Affected

• Major platforms, including X (Twitter), Vimeo, Steam, GitHub, and others, have experienced downtime due to the outage.

• The widespread problem is not limited to specific types of websites; any site relying on Cloudflare’s services could be impacted.

In summary, Cloudflare’s outage is causing a ripple effect across the internet, affecting the usability of millions of websites due to a failure in its core networking and security infrastructure.