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Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Major Websites for Three Hours

3/23/2026

35 4 Full Breakdown

Summary

Story summary

On March 23, 2026, Cloudflare experienced a global outage affecting websites, including X and OpenAI, from 11:48 AM to 2:48 PM.
The issue arose from a configuration file that exceeded its size, triggering a software crash with no evidence of malicious activity.
Prof. Alan Woodward noted the limited number of internet infrastructure companies and the rapid impact of such failures.
Cloudflare apologized and committed to learning from the incident.

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Story summary

On March 23, 2026, Cloudflare experienced a global outage affecting websites, including X and OpenAI, from 11:48 AM to 2:48 PM.
The issue arose from a configuration file that exceeded its size, triggering a software crash with no evidence of malicious activity.
Prof. Alan Woodward noted the limited number of internet infrastructure companies and the rapid impact of such failures.
Cloudflare apologized and committed to learning from the incident.