The Cloudflare Meltdown That Broke Half the Internet

Cloudflare had a bad day, and it dragged half the internet down with it. Services like ChatGPT and X stalled worldwide after an internal Cloudflare system choked on a configuration file that grew larger than engineers expected.

The company says it wasn’t an attack — just a plumbing failure that moves traffic around the web. For users in the UAE, the outage was a reminder that even local apps can get stuck when an upstream global provider blinks.

What actually happened

Cloudflare reported issues around 06:40 a.m. ET (about 14:40 in the UAE). Soon after, users everywhere noticed apps refusing to load or timing out.

• ChatGPT, X, gaming services and e-commerce sites were among those affected.
• Downdetector showed thousands of user complaints at the peak.
• Cloudflare pushed a fix a few hours later and services recovered by mid-afternoon ET.

Cloudflare later explained that one of its automated security configuration files grew beyond the size the routing system could handle. When the file ballooned, the system crashed, taking a chunk of Cloudflare’s vast edge network with it. No malicious activity was found.

Why a single glitch broke so much

Cloudflare sits between you and the sites you open every day. It speeds up traffic and filters threats for millions of domains.

• Cloudflare handles roughly 20% of global web traffic.
• Many apps — even ones that look local — run on its network.
• When its routing layer fails, websites can’t serve pages or load assets.

Because of that reach, even a small internal failure spreads quickly. Users in the UAE may have noticed slow apps or blank screens even though local networks were fine. The problem was upstream, not with DU or Etisalat.

If you want to read more about how internet infrastructure behaves in the region, check out our guide on understanding broadband speeds and our recent coverage on UAE cloud services.

Impact on UAE users and businesses

The outage didn’t target the region, but the effects were global.

• UAE users couldn’t access global apps routed through Cloudflare.
• Businesses running Cloudflare-protected sites saw increased error rates.
• Some payment and retail sites relying on Cloudflare’s caching layer struggled to load.

For UAE companies that rely heavily on Cloudflare, it’s worth reviewing redundancy. Having a backup CDN or failover routing path can soften these hits. Even major providers slip — we saw similar ripple effects when Meta apps went down earlier this year, which we covered in our piece on recent global outage.

What Cloudflare is doing next

Cloudflare says the faulty configuration file has been corrected and changes are being added to prevent it from growing unexpectedly again.

• Engineers are revising the auto-generation logic.
• Crash protections in the routing software are being updated.
• Monitoring tools are being improved to catch similar-sized spikes early.

In other words, they’re trying to ensure one oversized file doesn’t take down the internet again. Cloudflare posts updates on its public status page, which is still the best place to check when things feel slow.

How to protect yourself and your business

There’s not much end-users can do besides wait, but businesses have options.

• Use multiple CDNs or cloud networks when your service is critical.
• Build fallback paths for DNS, asset delivery and APIs.
• Monitor upstream services so you know where the failure sits.

If you run a UAE-based startup or e-commerce site, events like this are a reminder to avoid single-point dependencies. You can find more practical tips in our breakdown of building reliable tech stacks.

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