Cloudflare explains outage that took down much of the internet

Cloudflare has revealed the cause behind an outage that took down much of the internet: one bad file .

On Tuesday, an incident at the web infrastructure company meant that many of the world’s biggest websites were knocked offline. Visitors to products such as ChatGPT, X and many other sites instead saw confusing error messages.

It quickly became clear that the problem was at Cloudflare, which provides technologies intended to ensure that websites are able to serve their pages to visitors. A technical error meant that those websites instead stopped working.

Some – including those working at Cloudflare – had speculated that the issue could be the result of a major cyber attack. But the company has now revealed that the problem was internal, and relatively simple.

Cloudflare has a “f