Why is everything from DayZ to League of Legends down? Cloudflare "issue" impacts servers globally

A Cloudflare outage has affected numerous popular videogames, including League of Legends, Valorant, DayZ-plus, for a brief, terrifying moment, everyone's favorite gaming news website, PCGamesN. Cloudflare first became aware of this issue this morning, and it posted a message to its status website to say, "Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing. We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly."

This message was updated 15 minutes later to say that it is "continuing to investigate this issue." During this time, however, loads of notable games have been impacted. All of Riot's servers seemed to go down, resulting in an error message being shown when trying to launch them. If you were hoping for a quick League of Legends match, now is not a great time.

Some of the best multiplayer games have been forced offline, social media platforms such as X are having issues, and even Downdetector, a website that monitors which games are currently facing server problems and my first port of call when it comes to writing articles like this one, is down. The irony is almost tangible.

Elsewhere on the internet, it seems that Steam is unaffected, so maybe it's time to dive deep into your backlog or finally play one of those Game Awards-nominated titles that you've been meaning to all year. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 earned a record-breaking 12 nominations, so I might finally have to load it up and see what it's all about.

When I was able to access Downdetector, it also showed that fanfic fans (fanfickers?) will have trouble accessing Archive of Our Own, Spotify is experiencing trouble, and reports of issues with Amazon Web Services are also spiking. The latter could be potentially problematic, as the last time AWS went down, everything from Roblox to international banking systems were impacted.

If you're reading this article and our site is back up, there's a chance that your favorite game is back online, too. But it's worth checking back on the Cloudflare status website to be sure, as well as confirming in-game by trying to launch into a match.

At the time of writing, Cloudflare has again updated its site to say, "We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts." Stay tuned for more updates.