A Cloudflare malfunction shuts down the internet, reveals why DePIN is inevitable

A massive outage at Cloudflare caused widespread disruption across the internet, taking platforms including X (Twitter), ChatGPT, YouTube and Zoom down.

Several multiplayer games were also affected in one of the most disruptive infrastructure incidents of the year.

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Cloudflare collapse: Why half the Internet suddenly went down

Cloudflare confirmed on Tuesday that it is “aware of and investigating an issue that may impact multiple customers.”

Cloudflare said it is aware of and investigating an issue that may affect many customers. More details will be provided as more information becomes available.

The company initially reported progress towards recovery, but quickly denied that it was still investigating the underlying root of the problem.

What users encounter

Across the affected sites, visitors encountered errors generated by CloudFlare such as:

• 500 Internal Server Error
• “Please open challenges.cloudflare.com to continue.”
• “Sorry, you’ve been blocked.”
• API and control panel failures

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In many cases, the warnings indicate security threats or blocked access, but in reality they were only caused by a failure of CloudFlare’s systems.

DownDetector’s website, which typically provides real-time visibility into outages, crashed, leaving users unable to verify what had gone down or where.

When the site loaded briefly, it showed a large increase in crash reports on several major platforms.

A global bottleneck on the Internet

CloudFlare provides thousands of companies with essential infrastructure supplies, from cybersecurity layers to traffic routing. This makes it one of the most important providers of critical infrastructure in the modern Internet.

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This outage comes after the AWS incident last month, highlighting the fragility of the Internet’s central infrastructure.

Cloudflare has scheduled maintenance today for its data center in Santiago (SCL), although it has not yet been confirmed if it has a role in it.

Platforms affected so far include:

• X/Twitter
• ChatGPT
• YouTube
• Zoom
• Letterboxd
• bet365
• Game services based on the CloudFlare API
• Many smaller sites have Cloudflare protection enabled

Some users have also reported that other Google services work intermittently.

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Industry rumors point to a bigger trend: DePIN

In the first reactions, many analysts note that such outages highlight the growing state ofDecentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN)systems designed to eliminate single points of failure in global Internet operations.

Binance founder Changping Zhao highlighted: light However, during the downtime, the blockchain continued uninterrupted.

Affected users do not need to troubleshoot their hardware, they just have to wait. The problem comes from the source, and the platforms will restore functionality once the Cloudflare network is stabilized.

This story is unfolding.