Cloudflare outage hits Chat GPT and other major companies’ operations

Today’s outage of infrastructure company Cloudflare’s global network has been impacting major companies’ operations, including Chat GPT, Spotify and X.

Problems started just before mid-day UK time, however the company has subsequently said that the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.

In reaction to the news, Fadl Mantash, Chief Information Security Officer, Tribe Payments said: “Today’s Cloudflare outage shows how vulnerable the digital economy has become. When a single upstream provider experiences issues, the impact doesn’t stay contained; it cascades across industries, touching everything from social media platforms to e-commerce checkouts and backend payment services.

“Payments are particularly exposed. The infrastructure behind a single transaction relies on a chain of cloud platforms, processors, third-party APIs, authentication tools, and card schemes. When any link in that chain fails, the entire journey can break. It’s the same pattern we saw during last year’s CrowdStrike incident: the initial issue wasn’t in payments, yet payments were among the most visible casualties.

“This is exactly why resilience can’t start at the moment of crisis. The payments industry needs to adopt the ‘prepper’ mindset – building modular systems that isolate faults, rehearsing failure scenarios, and ensuring teams know precisely how to respond when something goes down. This also reflects the importance of adhering to robust frameworks in our day-to-day activities. As a highly regulated industry, the many compliance frameworks provide critical guarantees that cover not just security, but also resilience against incidents.

“Resilience is one side of the foundational information security triad: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Companies need to make all three principles their ‘bread and butter’. By ensuring the confidentiality of sensitive data, the integrity of transactions, and the availability of services even during disruptions, we can build a more secure and trustworthy financial ecosystem.”

Shuaib Rabbani, Major Incident Management Product Owner at HaloITSM has also commented on the outage saying: ‘Standard IT Service Management (ITSM) tools often struggle under the pressure of major incidents, where minutes can define outcomes. No matter how much precaution is taken, downtime is inevitable so organisations need a faster, clearer way to manage critical events – rather than treating them as an afterthought. CIOs therefore need to prioritise systems that offer a single, secure workspace where technical teams, business stakeholders, and executives can see, understand, and act on incidents in real time… Afterall time is the enemy so an inadequate incident response strategy can end up costing businesses both financially and reputably.’