There was a stir in the fast-paced internet world on Tuesday evening. Many websites including X, ChatGPT came to a standstill. What happened was that Cloudflare, which provides internet infrastructure services, had a technical glitch. Due to this, all the big websites were down for 3-4 hours. In India, many websites started facing problems from 5.30 pm onwards. The problem continued till around 9:30 pm. Many users reported that due to this outage, the website was showing ‘Error Code 500’ when opened.
What happened? Actually, this entire outage was caused by a failure in Cloudflare’s network. Cloudflare had said that there are problems in internal services, due to which there are problems in API and dashboard.
But how did a technical glitch cause the outage at Cloudflare? Many people think there is nothing between their phone or laptop and the website. But this does not happen. In between are companies like Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s servers store the content of 20% of the websites around the world in its servers. These servers are spread all over the world. Whenever you open a website, it first connects to Cloudflare’s server and fetches the content from there.
On Tuesday, an automatically generated configuration file used to monitor Cloudflare’s threat traffic encountered an error. This file became much larger than the size, due to which the software crashed. Due to this, its servers all over the world got disrupted and 20% of the internet got disrupted. It has also become clear that this was not a cyber attack, but an internal software bug which has now been fixed.
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On whom was it affected?
Due to Cloudflare’s servers being down, many websites around the world were affected. More than 21 lakh complaints were registered on Tuesday on Downdetector, a website that tracks outage problems in the internet world. Interestingly, Downdetector was also down.
- Social Media: X, Truth Social
- AI Services: ChatGPT, Claude AI, Character AI, OpenAI
- Streaming and Entertainment: Spotify, League of Legends, Letterboxd
- Business Tools: Zoom, Square, Deforce, Indeed
- E-Commerce: Ikea, Uber, Google Store
- Creative Platform: Canva, Archives of Our Own
- Education Tools: Quizlet, Canvas
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After all, how much loss does it cause?
Actually, if anything stops or stops, it causes loss. But when it comes to internet, even a minute’s interruption can cause losses worth millions.
According to the report ‘The True Cost of Website Downtime in 2025’, the world’s top 2000 companies had suffered a loss of 400 billion dollars due to internet down. This amount in Indian currency is more than Rs 35.40 lakh crore. It was told that due to internet down, every company had lost an average of $ 14,056 every minute.
According to this report, 93% of the companies had said that due to internet down they suffered a loss of 3 lakh dollars every hour. At the same time, 48% of the companies claimed that they would have suffered a loss of one million dollars every hour.
The Mirror US report estimates that companies may have lost $5 to $15 billion every hour of Tuesday’s outage.
How does even a short downtime hurt the economy? Let us understand this with the example of X. Finance Monthly has estimated in its report that due to the global outage, X would have lost $ 2.85 lakh every hour. Finance Monthly has made this estimate based on the revenue of X. The report states that X earns revenue of $2.5 billion annually. According to this, he gets a revenue of 2.85 lakh dollars every hour. Therefore, if X stops even for an hour, it would result in a loss of $2.85 lakh.
Similarly, between January and June this year, ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI had earned a total revenue of $4.3 billion. Accordingly, he earned an average revenue of $23.7 million every day. According to this, OpenAI earned approximately 9.9 lakh dollars every hour. From this, it can be estimated that due to ChatGPT being down, the company may suffer a loss of approximately 9.9 lakh dollars every hour.
What’s more, Cloudflare shares also fell 3% due to the server down. The price of a share of Cloudflare fell from $202.25 to $196.53.
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