By Lisa Eadicicco, CNN

(CNN) — Having problems with your favorite websites lately? It’s not just you.

Web infrastructure provider Cloudflare experienced a disruption on Tuesday that temporarily impacted a swath of online services – from Spotify to ChatGPT and even President Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform – marking the latest in a string of high-profile internet outages.

An Amazon Web Services issue disrupted the daily routines of millions of people last month, in some cases preventing them from doing even simple tasks like ordering coffee or managing smart home appliances. Just days later, Microsoft’s Azure service was hit with an outage.

According to experts, it’s a sign of the times – a combination of society’s increased reliance on digital services, the consolidation of critical cloud infrastructure between just a few companies and the proclivity of people to complain about tech mishaps online.

It also shows that no one, not even major tech companies, are immune to tech malfunctions.

“It really almost doesn’t matter how well-situated the provider is in these cases, or even how sophisticated the IT organization and infrastructure is for a private business,” said Eileen Haggerty, area vice president of product and solutions marketing for IT and cybersecurity firm Netscout. Tech disruptions like these are “very, very common problems.”

What happened at Cloudflare

Cloudflare’s outage was the result of a technical issue, not a cyberattack or malicious behavior, the company said in a statement to CNN.

The company said the outage was caused by a “configuration file” that was meant to manage “threat traffic.”

“The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services,” the statement said.

Dane Knecht, chief technology officer at Cloudflare, shared additional details in a post on X on Tuesday afternoon. In short: a routine configuration change caused a bug to crash, which “cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services.”

“Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today,” he wrote.

The Amazon outage similarly involved a bug, which kicked off when two automated systems tried to update the same data simultaneously.

IT outages are relatively common, tech experts say. Twenty years ago, it was typical for IT services to down “all the time,” said Mike Chapple, an IT professor at the University of Notre Dame and former computer scientist for the National Security Agency.

“It would not be unusual to go a week at work having at least one outage of some IT service,” he said, noting that now everyone relies on the same large providers.

The impacts can be widely felt when they happen at the major providers, such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google, that serve as the backbone of the web.

Issues submitted to Downdetector, a website that tracks user-reported problems with popular online platforms, surpassed 2.1 million on Tuesday, according to data provided to CNN by Downdetector parent company Ookla.

Cloudflare says it handles 81 million HTTP requests – or when web browsers need certain data to trigger an action, such as loading a webpage – per second on average.

Are there really more outages happening lately?

That there have been three widespread outages in less than a month is a coincidence. But Haggerty acknowledged that it certainly feels like these outages are happening more often, mostly because of the scale of their impact.

The number of service outages has “remained consistent,” but the “number of sites and applications dependent on these services has increased, making them more disruptive to users,” Angelique Medina, head of internet intelligence for Cisco ThousandEyes, told CNN in an emailed statement.

Cisco’s network monitoring service has logged 12 major outages in 2025 so far, according to a timeline published on its website, not counting Tuesday’s Cloudflare disruption.

That compares to 23 in 2024, 13 in 2023 and 10 in 2022. A sweeping Crowdstrike outage upended businesses, flights and hospitals around the world in 2024.

There are some common trends between outages that occurred in the first half of 2025, according to Cisco. A string of outages were linked to systems accidentally spreading tech failures, systems that appeared to be functioning properly despite silent issues occurring and configuration changes that cascaded.

While these trends aren’t new, Cisco’s blog post says it’s been “seeing more of these types of disruptions with more far-reaching consequences.”

And it’ll likely happen again.

“They aren’t something you’d say, ‘Well, thank God that would never happen to us,’” said Haggerty. “All of these could actually happen to any business.”

CNN’s Hadas Gold contributed to this report.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.