Cloudflare (NET) Stock Tanks After Major Outage Cripples X, ChatGPT, and More

Tech giant Cloudflare faces investor backlash as its stock takes a nosedive following a widespread service disruption.

The outage—which knocked out platforms like X and ChatGPT—highlights the fragility of our hyper-connected digital infrastructure. Wall Street reacts with predictable panic, proving yet again that tech stocks trade on hype cycles, not fundamentals.

When the cloud fails, markets tumble. But for crypto natives? Just another Tuesday.

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The issue emerged around 6:30 a.m. EST after thousands of users reported downtime on X and other platforms on Downdetector, an outage monitoring platform. However, in the latest update on the situation on its website, Cloudflare noted that it has identified the issue behind the outage and is working to rectify it.

Cloudflare Responds to Outage

While the San Francisco-based company noted that it continues to work to restore access for its application services customers, the firm had to briefly disable access from London to its secure login service WARP. It also deactivated access to WARP, its secure VIRTUAL private network service.

The cause of the outage remains unclear at the time of writing.

“We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover,” Cloudflare said in an update on its website. “Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates.”

The latest outage comes over five months after a widespread outage crippled several Cloudflare and Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Google Cloud products. The cybersecurity company had blamed the issue on authentication failures on its Access service and connectivity issues with its Zero Trust WARP product.

Cloudflare helps hundreds of thousands of businesses across the world to protect their platforms from malicious web traffic. The company offers services that help companies fend off hacking attempts and prevent their sites from crashing due to traffic overload.

Is NET Stock a Good Buy?

On Wall Street, Cloudflare’s shares currently have a Moderate Buy consensus rating based on 14 Buys and 10 Holds issued by analysts over the past three months.

At $26.11, the average NET price target indicates over 26% upswing potential from the current trading level.