Update: 17:23 — Friday, Azar 14, 1404 AP (GMT+8) Philippines Time
An extensive internet disruption across multiple areas was the result of an unexpected and Cloudflare-wide service malfunction. The network blackout, which locally in the Philippines was detected around 17:13, rapidly evolved into a global slowdown Cloudflare Outage that resulted in numerous websites becoming inaccessible. Consequently, users from Southeast Asia, the United States, Europe, and parts of the Middle East began to report error messages that indicated that that the problems were directly with Cloudflare’s failing challenge systems.
When people attempted to access their usual platforms, they were met with bewildering prompts such as “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed,” “Cloudflare Error 500,” and in some cases, even full-page blocks that implied that websites were not available. The sudden blasting of such messages caused a widespread panic of users who first thought that the problem was with their internet connection.
However, the reality was that the problem was far outside of the network sphere of individual users.
Cloudflare, a company that is a major security and performance backbone for thousands of websites, went through what looks like a significant-scale internal malfunction. From the sounding of the first reports, its challenge validation service—normally used to differentiate human users from bots—had stopped working. Many websites without this screen couldn’t authorize the real human visitors, thus they suddenly broke them out of their accounts.
The impact was immediate and widespread. Among the affected were the platforms and services that people heavily relied on daily such as ChatGPT, X/Twitter, Canva, Riot Games, Valorant, Forex Factory, Letterboxd, Pixabay, and numerous AI tools, etc. News streams stopped altogether, the users were locked out due to failed login credentials, and servers became unresponsive. The entire blackout was like a domino effect in which once Cloudflare went down, the rest of the webplatforms suffered.
People started searching for phrases like “Why is Cloudflare down today?”,” “Is ChatGPT down?” and “Cloudflare challenge blocked.” within a very short time frame, which clearly indicates their combined confusion.
Several users have thought that the error was their ISP or router causing them to be blocked, whereas the cause was entirely on Cloudflare’s side. In the event of its verification engine being unable to handle requests, it resort to automatically rejecting or disabling those requests which then cause overflows of the operations that crash websites globally.
While the blackout in gradually easing, and a few locations have already reported a partial recovery, problems in various areas remain. Some individuals are able to visit websites as usual, while others continue to experience challenge failures or cannot load delays.
To facilitate problems, professionals suggest that one should try reloading the webpage, removing browser usage traces, changing connection or simply patiently waiting—since the problem is not from the user’s side and cannot be solved locally.
At present, Cloudflare is coming back to normal but not entirely. Real-time dashboards and the trending hashtags on X indicate that the issue is still being closely monitored.
The incident highlights the dependence of the internet on infrastructure providers such as Cloudflare and how the failure of one system can make the entire web seem “broken” for a period of time.