When you manage traffic for roughly 20% of the internet, a bad morning becomes everyone's bad morning. That's exactly what happened Tuesday when Cloudflare Inc. (NET) experienced a global outage that rippled across the web.
Downdetector lit up with over 10,800 reported issues at the peak. The breakdown tells the story: 62% of users couldn't connect to servers, 28% had website problems, and 11% faced hosting disruptions. For a company whose entire business is keeping the internet running smoothly, this wasn't ideal.
The outage took down some heavy hitters. OpenAI's ChatGPT went dark, racking up close to 2,000 issue reports. Elon Musk's social media platform X also struggled, with problems reported hitting nearly 13,000 at the peak. OpenAI acknowledged the disruption on its status page, pointing to issues with a "third-party service provider" that affected both ChatGPT and its video tool Sora.
Cloudflare traced the problem to a "spike in unusual traffic" that started around 6:20 a.m. ET. The company launched an "all hands on deck" investigation and eventually deployed a fix to restore service. Quick response matters when you're the infrastructure holding up a fifth of the web.
Investors weren't thrilled about any of this. Cloudflare shares dropped more than 5% in premarket trading as the news spread. By regular trading hours, the stock was down 3.6% to $194.93, according to market data.
The timing adds an interesting wrinkle: Cloudflare shares had surged 71% so far in 2025, massively outperforming the broader market. One rough morning doesn't erase that run, but it's a stark reminder that when you're critical infrastructure, every hiccup gets amplified.
