Cloudflare CTO apologizes to the internet as a whole after global outage
On Tuesday afternoon, Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht apologized to the internet.
After Cloudflare resolved an outage that caused widespread problems across the internet ecosystem, Knecht took to X to offer his apologies. The CTO wrote, "I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused."
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His mea culpa continued: "That issue, impact it caused, and time to resolution is unacceptable. Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today."
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Knect also posted an update on the outage on X, promising a full explanation for the underlying issue.
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On Tuesday mornings, the Cloudflare outage caused a broad range of services, apps, and websites to go down for many users. The website Downdetector showed user-reported issues at X, ChatGPT, Canva, Spotify, League of Legends, Canva, DoorDash, Claude, Uber, and YouTube. Even Grindr went down temporarily. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, Mashable's parent company.)
In an emailed statement to Mashable on Tuesday morning, Cloudflare said the problem was caused by a crash in a software system that handled traffic for many of its customers.
"To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity," the statement added. "We expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post incident but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours. A detailed explanation will be posted soon on blog.cloudflare.com. Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. We will learn from today's incident and improve."
If this internet outage feels familiar, it's because it's the third major outage in 2025. Just last month, we reported on a widespread Amazon Web Services outage. And before that, a Google Cloud Platform outage likewise took down swaths of the internet.
Topics Apps & Software
Timothy Beck Werth is the Tech Editor at Mashable, where he leads coverage and assignments for the Tech and Shopping verticals. Tim has over 15 years of experience as a journalist and editor, and he has particular experience covering and testing consumer technology, smart home gadgets, and men’s grooming and style products. Previously, he was the Managing Editor and then Site Director of SPY.com, a men's product review and lifestyle website. As a writer for GQ, he covered everything from bull-riding competitions to the best Legos for adults, and he’s also contributed to publications such as The Daily Beast, Gear Patrol, and The Awl.
Tim studied print journalism at the University of Southern California. He currently splits his time between Brooklyn, NY and Charleston, SC. He's currently working on his second novel, a science-fiction book.
