MW What is Cloudflare, and why is it causing outages across the internet today

By Emily Bary

As services like X and ChatGPT experience disruptions, attention turns to Cloudflare, the $70 billion company that helps route network traffic behind the scenes

Cloudflare acknowledged service issues on Tuesday.

Cloudflare investors may be fearing a repeat of the Amazon Web Services outage that disrupted the internet last month, as shares of the cybersecurity company were falling in Tuesday's premarket action upon service disruptions of its own.

The company on Tuesday acknowledged a service issue impacting multiple customers, sparking error messages and affecting connections to application programming interfaces, or APIs. While Cloudflare (NET) said in a status update that services were starting to recover, the company also noted that "customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts."

Users on Downdetector reported issues with various services like X and OpenAI's ChatGPT. OpenAI noted on its own status page that ChatGPT was down for some users but didn't link the issue to Cloudflare, and the company didn't respond to a MarketWatch request for comment.

Shares of Cloudflare were off more than 3% in premarket trading Tuesday.

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The outage highlights how online services rely on behind-the-scenes services that aren't household names to consumers - until things go awry.

Cloudflare sells cybersecurity offerings that help sites build applications and protect themselves against threats. The company operates a network that allows it to transfer data quickly and security in the cloud era, especially for customers looking to route information between different locations. Cloudflare distributes internet traffic throughout its network to optimize performance.

In its latest annual report, Cloudflare noted that the rise of cloud-based services has made it so companies need more modern solutions than on-premise hardware boxes if they want to scale globally.

The company's cloud services make customers "more secure, enhancing the performance of their business-critical applications, and eliminating the cost and complexity of managing individual network hardware," according to Cloudflare's filing. Cloudflare also partners with internet service providers.

While Cloudflare may not have much name recognition with ordinary internet users, its role in transmitting and securing data has helped the company achieve a $70 billion market capitalization.

See also: Here's what really matters for Amazon's stock - beyond the AWS outage

-Emily Bary

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November 18, 2025 08:23 ET (13:23 GMT)

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