Citizen Journal Hit by Widespread Outage Amid Major Cloudflare Failure

Citizen Journal’s website and mobile app were briefly knocked offline Tuesday morning as part of a sweeping internet disruption caused by a major Cloudflare outage. The failure began shortly after 8 a.m. Eastern, with outage-monitoring sites such as DownDetector showing sharp spikes in reports as workers across the East Coast logged on for the day. Citizen Journal’s publishing system, mobile feeds, and homepage all went dark, mirroring outages seen across news, finance, travel, and e-commerce platforms nationwide.

Cloudflare is a behind-the-scenes service that acts like a combination traffic cop and security guard for the internet. Many websites route their traffic through Cloudflare so pages load faster and are better protected from attacks; when Cloudflare has a bad morning, millions of sites can have a bad morning too. Various estimates suggest Cloudflare now handles roughly one-fifth of all web traffic and sits in front of around 20% of all websites, including many of the world’s most-visited destinations. 

Tuesday’s problems come less than a month after a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage in October that halted airline check-ins, delayed hospital systems, and crippled online platforms. Together, the AWS incident and the Cloudflare failure highlight how deeply the modern economy depends on a small number of cloud and network providers—and how fragile that system can be when any one of them stumbles. As more of daily life moves online—from banking to supply chains to local news distribution—brief outages ripple across the economy, highlighting how essential and yet vulnerable the internet’s core infrastructure has become.