A significant outage at Cloudflare, a network and security services provider relied on by many financial firms, has disrupted several major websites and apps.
Among those affected were ChatGPT, X, and Spotify, which experienced issues due to a “spike in unusual traffic” around 6:00 am ET on Tuesday. Cloudflare stated, “We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” but assured that their team is working diligently to resolve the issues and serve all traffic without errors.
Reports indicate that some UK retailers are facing challenges with contactless payments. Fadl Mantash, CISO of Tribe Payments, remarked, “Today’s Cloudflare outage highlights the vulnerabilities within the digital economy. When a single upstream provider encounters problems, the impact spreads across various industries, affecting everything from social media platforms to e-commerce checkout and backend payment services. Payments particularly suffer, relying on a chain of cloud platforms, processors, third-party APIs, authentication tools, and card schemes.”
Thomas Gillan, CEO of BR-DGE, noted: “An outage like this doesn’t just take one site offline; it can affect all dependent services, such as checkout pages and payment APIs. For merchants relying on a single payment provider and hosting layer, the risks intensify. An infrastructure outage can lead to payment disruptions, revenue loss, and hinder expansion.”
This incident follows recent issues faced by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, both of which took several sites, including banking services, offline. The concentration of dependency on a few cloud service providers—where AWS and Azure account for over half (55%) of the market—raises concerns.
In light of previous outages, the UK government has pledged to develop a plan for managing future incidents. Ian Murray, Minister for Digital Government and Data, announced that the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology would outline a clear strategy for addressing cybersecurity challenges and outages by the end of the year.