Cloudflare Outage Disrupts X, OpenAI, and Gaming Platforms, including Valorant

If you were browsing this morning and saw prompts like “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed,” on some of your favorite websites, you weren’t alone.

Valorant | Image: Riot Games via Gaming Amigos

Cloudflare confirmed this morning that a major outage impacted multiple platforms, with a fix now being implemented.

The disruption began around 6:00 AM ET and quickly spread across popular services, leaving users unable to access websites like X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, Shopify, Discord, Claude AI, Canva, Garmin, Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T.

Even online games faced the same problem. Some of these games are League of Legends, Valorant, Counter-Strike 2, Battlefield 6, Rocket League, Halo Infinite, Elden Ring, Fortnite, and Apex Legends. Popular storefronts, Steam, and Epic Games Store also experienced the disruptions.

According to the official Cloudflare Status page, the issue was tied to internal service degradation, though the company has not revealed the exact root cause. Interestingly, scheduled maintenance at its Santiago datacenter was planned during this time, which may have overlapped with the outage, as per Windows Central.

Cloudflare later confirmed disabling WARP access in London as part of its remediation efforts, though U.S. users were not directly affected. At 8:09 AM ET, Cloudflare stated that “the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”

By 9:13 AM ET, Cloudflare announced that Access and WARP services had returned to normal levels, with WARP re-enabled in London. The company continues to monitor and restore other services. For now, the worst appears to be over, but this outage highlights just how dependent the internet ecosystem is on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.