Here’s why Cloudflare went down alongside the latest updates
Cloudflare, the backbone company that carries and secures a huge chunk of internet traffic worldwide, experienced a major service disruption overnight.
The outage reportedly began around 10:50 pm AEDT and quickly rippled across Australia – and beyond – with users globally reporting slow or unreachable websites.
Major platforms were affected, including ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), airport and transport sites in Australia, and a long list of services that rely on Cloudflare’s network for speed, security, or DNS stability. Internationally, users across Asia, Europe, and parts of the US also saw widespread 5xx errors, connection resets, and long loading times as Cloudflare-dependent services stalled.
Cause & response:
Cloudflare says the incident was not the result of a cyberattack. Instead, a sudden spike in unusual traffic triggered failures within some of their traffic-handling systems.
Engineers rolled out a fix shortly after identifying the issue, and the company says systems have now returned to “normal operation.”
Current status:
Most major services have recovered in Australia, the US, Europe, and Asia, although some apps and websites may still feel a little sluggish as caches refresh and DNS changes settle.
Cloudflare’s status page is now showing all core systems as operational, and global traffic patterns appear to have stabilised.
What to do if you’re affected:
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Check the official Cloudflare status page — they’re posting live updates there.
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If a website is still misbehaving, it may be experiencing after-effects such as stale cache, delayed DNS propagation, or local routing issues.
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If you run a service that depends on Cloudflare, monitor your dashboards closely and expect the possibility of minor intermittent behaviour for a short while longer.
In short:
A big internet “whoops” at Cloudflare caused widespread website outages and slowdowns in Australia and across multiple regions worldwide.
The issue appears to have stemmed from internal traffic-handling failures rather than anything malicious. A fix has been deployed, services are mostly back, but the odd hiccup may linger.
If you’re still seeing problems, keep an eye on Cloudflare’s updates — and maybe give your DNS or cache a refresh.
