Cloudflare CTO apologizes to the internet as a whole after global outage
On Tuesday afternoon, Cloudflare’s Chief Technology Officer, Dane Knecht, issued a public apology following a significant outage that disrupted numerous online services worldwide. The incident, which affected a vast array of websites and applications, prompted Knecht to express regret on social media, acknowledging that Cloudflare had failed its customers and the broader internet community. He emphasized that many businesses and organizations rely on Cloudflare’s infrastructure for their operations, and the outage caused considerable inconvenience and disruption. Knecht’s statement was a candid admission of the severity of the issue, stating, “The issue, impact it caused, and time to resolution is unacceptable.”
The outage, which occurred on Tuesday morning, was attributed to a crash in a software system responsible for handling traffic for many of Cloudflare’s clients. This technical failure led to widespread reports of service disruptions across popular platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Canva, Spotify, League of Legends, and even dating app Grindr. Downdetector, a platform that tracks service outages, recorded a surge in user-reported issues during the outage, highlighting the extensive reach of the problem. In a follow-up statement, Cloudflare clarified that there was no evidence suggesting the outage resulted from malicious activity, reassuring users that the situation was being addressed. Knecht promised a full explanation of the underlying issues would be shared on Cloudflare’s blog, emphasizing the company’s commitment to learning from this incident to prevent future occurrences.
This incident marks the third major internet outage in 2025, following previous disruptions linked to Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. Such recurring outages raise concerns about the reliability of critical internet infrastructure and the potential ramifications for businesses and users alike. As Cloudflare works to rectify the situation and restore normal operations, the incident serves as a reminder of the interconnected nature of online services and the importance of robust infrastructure to support them. The company’s swift acknowledgment and commitment to improvement reflect an understanding of the critical role it plays in the digital ecosystem, and many will be watching closely to see how they implement changes to enhance their reliability moving forward.
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.”
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.
