A major outage at internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare knocked parts of the internet offline, disrupting access to X, NJ Transit, ChatGPT and other major platforms early Tuesday morning.
Users were met with an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network” and told to “please try again in a few minutes” as sites relying on the company’s infrastructure failed to load.
The problems began around 6:30 a.m. ET, when several websites intermittently failed before going fully dark.
About 15 minutes later, Cloudflare acknowledged the disruption, saying, “Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers.”
It added, “Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”
Down Detector, which tracks outages, briefly went down itself before showing spikes at X, OpenAI, bet365, League of Legends and payment firm Sage.
Cloudflare later updated its status, saying it was “continuing to investigate this issue,” and reported early signs of improvement: “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
Cloudflare has not identified the cause of the outage.
An NJ Transit spokesperson confirmed the outage, telling The Post: “Due to a vendor firewall-related issue, parts of NJ Transit’s digital services, including NJTransit.com, the NJ Transit mobile app and DepartureVision, may be temporarily unavailable or slow to load.”
“Our teams are monitoring the situation closely and will restore full functionality as soon as the vendor implements a fix,” the spokesperson added.
“We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience.”
A spokesperson for New York City Emergency Management said the agency is tracking the situation and has not seen major effects so far.
“NYCEM is aware of reports of impacts to services provided by Cloudflare, and we are continuing to monitor and check for any major impacts or disruptions to city services and partner agencies,” a spokesperson for NYCEM told The Post.
“No significant resource requests have been made to NYCEM at this time. We will share updates if the situation significantly changes.”
The outage is the latest significant glitch to hit the internet in recent years as users have witnessed just how vulnerable global digital infrastructure has become.
The most damaging was CrowdStrike’s failure from July of last year, when a faulty Falcon Sensor update crashed 8.5 million Windows systems and caused more than $10 billion in losses across aviation, healthcare and financial services.
In February 2024, an AT&T network configuration mistake crippled mobile service nationwide for more than 12 hours, blocking tens of millions of calls — including thousands to 911 — and triggering a federal settlement.
Cloud platforms suffered significant disruptions as well. Microsoft Azure endured multi-continent outages in 2023 and 2024 from a faulty router update, a DDoS attack and a regional power incident.
Most recently, Amazon Web Services, a provider that supports roughly one-third of the internet, experienced a DNS (domain name system) failure that took down major apps.
Other critical systems faltered too. The FAA’s NOTAM failure in 2023 grounded flights nationwide after a contractor deleted essential files, while ransomware attacks across healthcare in 2023 and 2024 forced hospitals into prolonged manual operations with average downtime of 24 days.
The Post has sought comment from Cloudflare.
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