Cloudflare Says Services Back to Normal After Outage. The Stock Is Falling Anyway.

Cloudflare suffered an outage on Tuesday, sending its shares lower. (Dreamstime)

Key Points

• Cloudflare stock fell to as low as $187.48 after widespread outages affected platforms including X and ChatGPT.
• An unusual traffic increase to a Cloudflare service at 6:20 a.m. Eastern time caused network errors.
• Cloudflare shares have surged over 80% in 2025, significantly outperforming the S&P 500’s 13% rise.

Cloudflare stock curtailed its losses on Tuesday after the cloud-service provider reported widespread outages across popular platforms such as X and ChatGPT.

In an update at 12:44 p.m. Eastern time, the company said services were back to operating normally. “We are no longer observing elevated errors or latency across the network,” Cloudflare wrote on its Status page.

After falling to as low as $187.48 earlier in the session, shares were down 1.9% at $198.45 in afternoon trading. The benchmark S&P 500 index was down 0.3%.

In a statement, the company explained that an unusual increase in traffic to one of its services at around 6:20 a.m. Eastern time had caused network traffic to encounter errors.

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While Cloudflare said shortly after 8 a.m. Eastern that the issue had been identified and a fix was in place, more than an hour later the company disclosed it was still working on a solution.

X, ChatGPT, dating app Grindr , online game League of Legends, and music streamer Spotify Technology were among the sites knocked offline, according to DownDetector.

The widespread outages mirrored a scene from the end of October, when Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services suffered an hours-long service disruption that threw much of the internet into a state of disarray. Popular social-media and gaming platforms such as Snapchat, Reddit, and Roblox were among the names affected.

Cloudflare’s drop on Tuesday might take some of the shine off an otherwise strong run this year. Cloudflare shares have surged more than 80% in 2025, compared with a 13% rise for the S&P 500.

Write to Mackenzie Tatananni at mackenzie.tatananni@barrons.com and George Glover at george.glover@dowjones.com