Ah, the inevitabilities of life: death, taxes, and eating crow on the internet.
Cloudflare, a primary internet infrastructure provider, experienced widespread outages on Tuesday morning, disrupting access to major platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify, and others. Among the affected services was Elon Musk’s X — an ironic twist given that, just one month earlier, Musk publicly mocked AWS customers following a large-scale Amazon Web Services outage that impacted services like Signal.
“Messages on X chat are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange ‘AWS dependencies,’ so I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head,” Musk wrote at the time on X. The statement can’t be linked directly now, as X is currently offline due to the Cloudflare outage.
Signal president Meredith Whittaker used the moment to highlight a broader structural concern: the internet’s dependence on a small number of hyperscale infrastructure providers.
“The question isn’t ‘why does Signal use AWS?’” she wrote on Bluesky. “It’s to look at the infrastructural requirements of any global, real-time, mass comms platform and ask how it is that we got to a place where there’s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers.”
Cloudflare noted on its status page that the underlying issue had been identified and that a fix was being implemented. However, as of publication time, services remain partially impacted. Some platforms are returning to service, but the outage is not fully resolved.
This story is developing…
