Widespread Internet Outage Disrupts Services Across North America

Millions of internet users experienced significant disruptions on Monday as a major outage took dozens of popular websites offline. The issues began around 8:35 a.m. ET, impacting services such as X, Zoom, Google, and Microsoft.

Cloudflare, a company that provides web security and routing services for a vast number of websites, stated it is investigating a fiber cut in Eastern North America. The company believes this incident is the cause of the localized outages and is unrelated to any global issues. A spokesperson for Cloudflare noted that Zayo, a network provider, was experiencing an outage on some of its network routes, which could render sites exclusively using Zayo unreachable.

"Traffic engineering efforts have successfully mitigated the majority of congestion and packet drops," Cloudflare reported. "Services are largely stable, with only minor residual impact remaining. A small number of intermittent errors may still be observed for services with origins in North America as we work to fully clear the remaining load."

A fiber cut occurs when a fiber-optic cable carrying internet traffic is physically damaged. Restoring service requires locating the break, dispatching repair crews, and rejoining the cable. While backup connections can often reroute traffic, major fiber cuts can still lead to widespread outages if critical network routes are affected.

In addition to the fiber cut, Cloudflare is also investigating a separate technical issue that has affected some of its customers. This issue involves users being unable to deploy Managed Rules, a security feature designed to protect websites from cyberattacks and malicious traffic. Downdetector, a website monitoring online outages, reported user issues with Cloudflare's dashboard, API authorization failures, and "404 Error" messages.