Person’s handing hold an iPhone displaying a Cloudflare Error while attempting to access a webpage, during an outage of the Cloudflare service, Lafayette, California, November 18, 2025.
Smith Collection/gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare was hit by an outage on Tuesday, knocking several major websites offline for global users.
E-commerce platform Shopify, job search engine Indeed, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, President Donald Trump’s Truth Social and Elon Musk’s social media platform X appear to have been affected by the Cloudflare issues, according to Downdetector, which itself could not be accessed for some users. NJ Transit reported issues with some of its digital services “due to a vendor.”
OpenAI’s status page also indicated its ChatGPT and Sora short-form video app were being impacted by “an issue with one of our third-party service providers.”
A Cloudflare spokesperson said the company observed a “spike in unusual traffic” to one of its services around 6:20 a.m. ET, causing some traffic passing through its network to experience errors.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson added. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
The company said it was “continuing to work on a fix” in an update posted to its status page at 9:22 a.m. ET.
Cloudflare’s software is used by many businesses worldwide, helping to manage and secure traffic for about 20% of the web. Among the services it provides are that it guards against distributed denial of service attacks, which are when malicious actors attempt to overload a website’s system with so many traffic requests that it can’t function.
Shares of Cloudflare slid more than 3%.
The issue comes less than a month after Amazon Web Services suffered a daylong disruption that took down numerous online services, followed by a global outage of Microsoft‘s Azure cloud and 365 services.
In July 2024, a faulty software upgrade by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused a widespread outage that temporarily halted flights, impacted financial services and pushed hospitals to delay procedures.
This story is developing. Please check back for updates.