If your morning felt like an F5 speedrun on your favorite sites, rest assured: it wasn’t your box, nor your VPN, nor a neighbor siphoning your Wi‑Fi. No, today it’s Cloudflare — one of the web’s biggest pillars of the modern infrastructure — that decided to have a little existential crisis. And when Cloudflare coughs, the whole Internet catches the flu.
A Tuesday Morning That Stings
The outage began late in the morning (Paris time), when Cloudflare acknowledged an “internal service degradation”. In less corporate terms: something blew up somewhere in the plumbing, and it cascaded.
Immediate consequences:
- Thousands of services worldwide offline,
- X (Twitter), ChatGPT, Canva, and a slew of sites and APIs in “Connection impossible” mode,
- Admin dashboards blinking like a Christmas tree,
- And system admins who rethink their career choices.
An Unexpected Surge in Traffic
According to initial information, the heart of the problem would be a sudden surge in unusual traffic. A kind of giant digital wave that crashed onto Cloudflare’s routers, causing a cascading series of network errors.
No indication yet of an attack or malicious act — we’d be more in the realm of a technical blunder, or a script that ran faster than intended. In short, a Tuesday like any other in the cloud.
Why Was Everyone Affected?
Simple: Cloudflare is a bit like the friendly neighbor who keeps the keys to 20% of the world’s web. CDN, DNS, DDoS protection, reverse proxy… many sites, from small forums to international giants, pass through their infrastructure without you even realizing it.
So when it goes down, the impact is broad.
Has It Been Repaired?
Cloudflare announced that the issue was largely resolved, although some residual outages might still be lingering here and there. The web is gradually returning to normal — you can stop sacrificing your SSH keys or rebooting your Freebox.
So, the End of the Internet?
Not this time! But every outage like this reminds us of one thing: the web is much more centralized than we think, and when a major pillar wobbles, the whole structure trembles.
In the meantime, enjoy the return to normal. And if you work at Cloudflare: stay strong, stay brave, and drink coffee.
Did you too spam F5 like in your heyday? Tell me everything in the comments!
