Korean internet users were hit by the global Cloudflare outage on Tuesday evening, enduring six hours of disruptions to major online platforms, including ChatGPT, Google, YouTube, X and popular PC games such as League of Legends. The rare interruption suddenly put the U.S.-based cloud and security company into the spotlight domestically, as many users learned for the first time the firm’s influence on internet traffic.

The disruption, triggered by an internal bug at Cloudflare, began in Korea at 8:20 p.m. Tuesday and was not fully resolved until 2:06 a.m. Wednesday. The severity of the outrage varied widely: some users experienced only brief delays while others faced a complete halt lasting several hours. Performance also differed by device, with some reporting issues only on desktop or only on mobile.

Because the outage struck during evening leisure hours, complaints quickly spread among users trying to unwind after work. ChatGPT, in particular, became a reference point for the failure, and many expressed surprise at the extent of Cloudflare’s influence across everyday platforms. Some users were unable to access services at all, got stuck in infinite loading screens, or encountered “500 Internal Server Error” messages.

A user who said they relied heavily on Canva, the online graphic design platform, wrote that they ultimately paused work altogether until the service stabilized, saying they were too dependent on the platform to work around the outage.

“Seeing how I can’t use something whenever even one connected service has an issue made me realize that all these technologies I thought were independent were actually much more interconnected than I believed,” the user wrote.

Another poster joked that now is the time to buy the company's shares, which were down 2.8 percent from the previous trading day, closing at $196.53 on Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange.

Cloudflare manages a significant portion of the internet, with more than one-fifth of global web traffic routed through its network, according to W3Techs. Although many initially suspected a cyberattack, the company denied any signs of malicious attacks and confirmed the cause was an internal configuration bug that caused core software components to fail across the network. Cloudflare resolved the issue by isolating the oversized configuration file responsible and manually overriding the faulty settings.

“We are sorry for the impact to our customers and to the internet in general,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a blog post that explained the outage. "Given Cloudflare's importance in the internet ecosystem, any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable. That there was a period of time where our network was not able to route traffic is deeply painful to every member of our team. We know we let you down today.”

Cloudflare said it will strengthen safeguards to prevent similar outages, including by strictly validating its internal configuration files, expanding the number of global “kill switches” that allow engineers to quickly shut off faulty features, and improving the failure-handling mechanisms of its core services.

The incident comes just a month after Amazon’s cloud business suffered a major outage that disrupted daily activities, including in Korea, where it caused errors with Samsung Wallet payments, halted gameplay in Battlegrounds and interrupted a wide range of Amazon services.