A global outage disrupted the internet and paralysed websites in Luxembourg

At around midday on Tuesday, one of the key internet infrastructure companies - US-based Cloudflare - suffered a glitch, causing outages to multiple sites around the world. The problems affected global platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT and the video game League of Legends, as well as several major sites in Luxembourg - including Yellow.lu, Paperjam and Tageblatt. Users experienced page loading errors and inability to access content en masse.

The first signs of the failure were recorded at around 12:20 p.m. Central European time. As reported by the AFP news agency, the cause was an abnormal traffic spike detected in one of Cloudflare's services. Such spikes can be caused by technical problems, configuration errors or cyberattacks, but the exact cause remains unknown.

Cloudflare controls about 20 per cent of the world's internet traffic, ensuring the security and acceleration of websites. Even a short-term failure in its systems has a domino effect - in fact, a whole layer of the Internet is disrupted. Despite this, the company said that the incident was not related to an external attack and promptly started restoring services.

By evening, most platforms were back up and running, but the incident was yet another reminder of the massive dependence of the modern internet on the infrastructure of a few large players.