If you tried to listen to Spotify, chat on Discord, or access your favourite websites back in June 2025, you probably ran into some mysterious error messages. Turns out, a major outage affecting Cloudflare knocked thousands of popular services offline for over two hours, leaving millions of people staring at blank screens wondering what was going on.
And here’s the kicker: the very website you’re reading this article on right now, Goosed.ie, also runs on Cloudflare. We would’ve been down too if this happened today.
What Actually Happened
On June 12th, Cloudflare experienced a massive service disruption that lasted two and a half hours. For anyone who’s not familiar, Cloudflare is basically the invisible backbone that keeps millions of websites running smoothly and protects them from attacks. When it goes down, a huge chunk of the internet goes with it.
At the peak of the outage, around 46,000 Spotify users couldn’t stream their music, 11,000 Discord users couldn’t chat with their mates, and 14,000 Google Cloud users were locked out of services. Snapchat stopped working properly, and even AI chatbot platform Character.ai went dark.
Why So Many Sites Went Down
The problem started with Google Cloud, which some Cloudflare services rely on. When Google’s infrastructure hit trouble, it created a domino effect that took down a massive chunk of Cloudflare’s network. Cloudflare didn’t beat around the bush, directly telling media outlets: “This is a Google Cloud outage”.
But here’s what made it so widespread: Cloudflare handles tens of millions of web requests every single second. All those websites, apps, and services depend on Cloudflare to stay online and load quickly. When Cloudflare stumbled, everything built on top of it came crashing down.
Real Impact on Everyday People
For regular users, the outage meant a frustrating afternoon of services simply not working. You’d click on a website and get an error page instead. Try to load a video and nothing would happen. Attempt to log into your favourite app and you’d be stuck staring at a loading screen.
The video streaming service took one of the biggest hits, with over 90% of videos failing to load during the worst of it. Live streams were completely knocked offline with a 100% failure rate. If you were trying to watch something important, you were simply out of luck.
Even trying to figure out what was wrong became impossible for many people, as Cloudflare’s own status dashboard wouldn’t let users log in to check what was happening.
The Scary Part
What really spooked people across social media was the sudden realisation of just how much of the internet depends on a handful of companies. One person on Reddit asked the question many were thinking: “Why does Cloudflare going down take down like 80 percent of the internet?” .
The answer is both simple and terrifying: we’ve built the modern internet on top of just a few massive infrastructure providers. When one of them has a bad day, millions of websites and services go dark simultaneously, affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
Back to Normal, But Questions Remain
Cloudflare eventually got everything back up and running by late Thursday afternoon, confirming all services were restored. Google Cloud also reported that most of its services had returned to normal. But for those two and a half hours, a significant portion of the internet was essentially broken.
This wasn’t even Cloudflare’s first major outage, and it probably won’t be the last. Every time it happens, we’re reminded that the internet isn’t quite as distributed and resilient as we’d like to think. It’s more like a house of cards, where one company stumbling can bring down thousands of websites with it.
And yes, that includes news sites like this one. So if you ever try to visit Goosed.ie and get an error page, there’s a decent chance Cloudflare is having another moment.
