‘We know we let you down today:’ Cloudflare apologises for global internet chaos

Weeks after describing Amazon Web Services’ outage, which knocked over 1,000 companies and millions of internet users offline, as “a bad day,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince had to address the implications of his own tech company’s blackout on Tuesday.

“We are sorry for the impact to our customers and to the internet in general. Given Cloudflare's importance in the internet ecosystem, any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable,” Prince wrote in a Cloudflare blog post. “That there was a period of time where our network was not able to route traffic is deeply painful to every member of our team. We know we let you down today.”

On Tuesday morning, thousands of global internet users were blocked from accessing websites and apps including X, Zoom, ChatGPT, YouTube, Spotify, Uber and other websites due to an issue with Cloudflare, a cloud services company used for internet security and efficiency by 20% of all websites worldwide. 

Visitors who attempted to access websites impacted by Cloudflare’s blackout were met with an internal server error message. When Cloudflare said the outage was resolved at 9:57 a.m. EST, it explained that users would find difficulty accessing affected sites, which included Shopify, New Jersey Transit’s digital services and Anthropic’s Claude chatbot.

Here’s how Cloudflare has publicly addressed the outage

In the thick of Cloudflare's outage, the tech company provided updates via its system status webpage in increments as rapid as eight minutes apart to update affected internet users on progress toward a resolution.  

“Update: we’ve deployed a change that has restored dashboard services. We are still working to remediate broad application services impact,” Cloudflare wrote. Eight minutes later, it announced, “Monitoring: a fix has been implemented, and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”

When the outage was resolved, Prince penned a blog post to apologise to impacted users and explain the cause, effects and back-end details of the issue. Near the top of the blog, Prince debunked rumours that Cloudflare’s outage was caused by a cyberattack. 

“The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyberattack or malicious activity of any kind…it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems' permissions, which caused the database to output multiple entries into a ‘feature file’ used by our bot management system,” Prince explained.

After the introduction, Prince sectioned his blog into a timeline of the outage, a description of how Cloudflare’s backend technology works and why those systems failed, impacts of the outage and a “remediation and follow-ups” conclusion. Cloudflare promoted the post to its 251,000 followers on X and 62,000 followers on Instagram. 

The tech company also re-posted a description of the outage from its chief technology officer, Dane Knecht, noting, “We always strive to be as transparent as possible in these types of situations.” The tech company has not addressed the outages via its social media or website blog since. 

Cloudflare, which was founded in 2009 and publicly launched in 2010, reported a 31% year-over-year increase in total revenue to $562 million in the third quarter of 2025. The tech company predicts a total revenue of $2.1 billion for all of 2025. 

This story first appeared on PRWeek U.S.