Following the closure of Henry’s Cafe Bar Propatir has been appointed to market the building

What was one of Cardiff’s best known nightspots, Henry’s Cafe Bar, is being marketed to attract a new operator. The owner of the building on Park Place is looking to secure a new tenant after owner of Henry’s, Stonegate Group, opted not to enter into a new lease. Henry’s, close to the New Theatre, was one of the best known night venues in Cardiff having operated at the location for 30 years. Stonegate, which is the largest pub company in the UK, took over the venue when it acquired the entire bar portfolio of Tattershall Castle Group in 2015. Henry’s closed back in February.

The empty building, which is owned by an undisclosed private landlord, extends to 25,000 sq ft, of which Henry’s occupied around 13,100 sq ft on the ground and basement levels.

Cardiff-based and recently established real estate investment and asset management firm Propatir, set up by Alex James, has been appointed to market the property. While at an early stage they have received strong interest from bar and restaurant firms, as well as from boutique and service apartment operators with a view to leasing the entire building from the landlord – subject to planning approval and refurbishment. While a challenging market for the UK hospitality sector, there are strong sub-sectors including private equity backed Irish bar operators and those catering for a mainly student market. Mr James said: “This is a prime opportunity to refresh a celebrated piece of Cardiff’s nightlife history. Leasing this iconic Park Place venue provides you with a fully fitted bar and restaurant within a character rich space boasting over 30 years of patron loyalty. This well-located hospitality venue captures strong, diverse footfall from local offices, students, and tourists alike, positioning your business precisely where Cardiff comes to celebrate, shop, and enjoy the theatre.” Mr James began his career with DTZ (now Cushman & Wakefield) before joining Knight Frank where he held senior roles including global capital markets partner and head of private client advisory. He has advised on real estate investment transactions with a value of more than $3bn..

BOZEMAN, Mont. — Shares of Snowflake Inc. surged Thursday, climbing $63.00, or 20.60%, to $368.84, after the cloud data platform company delivered second-quarter results that blew past Wall Street expectations and raised its full-year outlook, marking one of the biggest single-day rallies in the company’s history as a public company.

Snowflake reported adjusted earnings per share of 62 cents for its fiscal second quarter, well ahead of the 45-cent consensus estimate compiled by analysts. Total revenue reached $1.55 billion, topping the $1.48 billion Wall Street had projected and representing 35% growth year over year. The results, released after market close Wednesday, immediately sent shares surging in extended trading, with the stock climbing as much as 22% to 24% in after-hours and premarket activity ahead of Thursday’s regular session.

Product revenue, the company’s primary growth metric that excludes its smaller services business, totaled $1.49 billion, up 37% from a year earlier. That figure marked the company’s third consecutive quarter of accelerating product revenue growth, directly countering investor concerns heading into the report that enterprise cloud spending, and Snowflake’s growth trajectory alongside it, might be beginning to slow.

Snowflake reported a net loss of $191.7 million, or 55 cents per share, for the quarter, an improvement from the $297.9 million net loss, or 89 cents per share, the company posted during the same period a year earlier.

Company executives pointed to strong adoption of Cortex, Snowflake’s suite of artificial intelligence tools, as a key driver behind the quarter’s results. The company specifically highlighted growth in Cortex Code, an AI coding agent that Snowflake said now has 9,100 customer accounts, an increase of more than 2,000 accounts added during the quarter alone.

Alongside the earnings beat, Snowflake issued guidance for the current quarter and full fiscal year that exceeded analyst projections. Executives said they expect $1.59 billion in product revenue for the fiscal third quarter, ahead of the $1.5 billion consensus estimate compiled by FactSet. The company also raised its full-year product revenue guidance to $6.1 billion, implying growth of roughly 36% for the year, and forecast an adjusted operating margin of 14.5%, up from just 10% the prior year and ahead of the company’s earlier guidance of 13.5%.

Bank of America analyst Koji Ikeda highlighted the significance of the accelerating product revenue trend in a note to clients following the results.

“The key debate into the print was whether Product revenue could keep accelerating,” Ikeda wrote. “It did, and [fiscal third quarter] guidance implies further acceleration.”

Analyst sentiment toward Snowflake has remained overwhelmingly positive following the results. Of the 52 analysts currently covering the stock, 46 maintain a buy or strong buy rating, according to data from LSEG, reflecting broad confidence in the company’s growth trajectory even after Thursday’s sharp move higher.

Thursday’s rally pushed Snowflake shares well beyond their prior 52-week high of $341.95, resetting market expectations for the stock heading into the remainder of the company’s fiscal year. Snowflake shares had already climbed 39% year to date heading into Wednesday’s earnings report, significantly outpacing the roughly 12% gain recorded by the broader S&P 500 index over the same period. Thursday’s additional surge extends that outperformance considerably further.

If the stock’s gains held through Thursday’s regular trading session at levels comparable to its after-hours move Wednesday night, the rally would represent the fourth-largest single-session jump in Snowflake’s history as a public company, according to data reviewed following the earnings release. Snowflake first went public in 2020 in what was, at the time, the largest software initial public offering in history.

The results follow a period of significant momentum for Snowflake shares throughout 2026, with the stock having already climbed roughly 88% between March and August, driven by strong adoption of the company’s AI-focused product suite and previous rounds of raised revenue growth forecasts. That rally had cooled somewhat in the days immediately preceding Wednesday’s earnings report, with shares pulling back roughly 4% amid a broader selloff affecting software stocks and growing investor caution over whether Snowflake could sustain its accelerating growth trajectory heading into the print.

Headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, Snowflake operates what it describes as an AI Data Cloud platform, allowing organizations to consolidate enterprise data into a single, centralized source that can be analyzed, shared and used to build custom data applications and AI-powered tools. The company’s technology has increasingly positioned it as a key infrastructure provider for enterprises building out AI capabilities, a dynamic that has helped sustain investor enthusiasm for the stock even as some other segments of the software industry have faced more skeptical scrutiny from Wall Street this year.

Snowflake’s remaining performance obligations, a closely watched measure of contracted future revenue that reflects the durability of the company’s customer backlog, have continued to grow alongside the company’s reported quarterly results, reinforcing analyst confidence in Snowflake’s ability to sustain its current growth trajectory over the coming quarters. The company’s net revenue retention rate, a metric measuring how much existing customers are increasing their spending over time, has also remained a closely tracked indicator of the underlying health of Snowflake’s customer relationships.

Executives discussed the quarter’s results with analysts during a conference call held Wednesday evening following the earnings release, addressing questions about the durability of the company’s AI-driven growth, the trajectory of its Cortex product suite, and the company’s updated guidance for the remainder of its fiscal year.

With Thursday’s rally, Snowflake has firmly reestablished itself among the strongest-performing large-cap software stocks of 2026, even as questions remain among some market watchers about the sustainability of a rally that has now pushed the stock to trade at a significant premium relative to broader software industry valuation benchmarks. For now, Wall Street’s reaction to Wednesday’s results has been overwhelmingly positive, with the combination of an emphatic earnings beat, an unexpected acceleration in product revenue growth, and a meaningful raise to full-year guidance giving investors renewed confidence in Snowflake’s position at the center of enterprise AI infrastructure spending heading into the final months of the year.

Players of Brawl Stars, the popular mobile battle game developed by Finnish gaming company Supercell, began reporting access problems Thursday morning, with outage-tracking site Downdetector logging a spike in complaints starting around 10:30 a.m. EDT.

The outage tracker’s official account flagged the surge in a post shortly after the reports began, asking affected users how the disruption was impacting them and directing people to its live outage dashboard for updates. The hashtag “BrawlStarsDown” began circulating on social media as players compared notes on the issue.

Thursday’s disruption reports coincide with the anticipated start of Season 54 in Brawl Stars, following the conclusion of the game’s previous season, known as Windstock. According to gaming outlets tracking Supercell’s update schedule, the current season, Season 53: Windstock, was expected to conclude on Sept. 3, with a major maintenance window widely anticipated between Sept. 1 and Sept. 3 to accommodate the transition into the new season.

Supercell had not officially announced the exact start time for the anticipated maintenance break as of earlier this week, though gaming trackers following the update cycle had flagged the Sept. 1-3 window as the most likely period for the change, given that Windstock served as the final season covered under the game’s current “Ramen Rebellion” content update. Major seasonal transitions of this kind typically require Supercell to take Brawl Stars offline briefly while new content, balance changes and season-specific features are pushed to players’ devices.

Brawl Stars has a documented history of temporary server disruptions tied to scheduled maintenance windows, which the game’s developer typically uses to implement bug fixes, balance adjustments to individual playable characters known as Brawlers, and the rollout of new seasonal content. The game’s most recent prior maintenance break, which took place on Aug. 4, was used by Supercell to apply bug fixes addressing issues involving several Brawlers, along with adjustments to the game’s respawn protection mechanics and the introduction of a system called NanoPower alongside broader Brawler balance changes.

Beyond scheduled maintenance, Brawl Stars and other Supercell-published titles have occasionally experienced more significant, unplanned server outages. In one notable prior incident, Supercell’s servers went down across multiple of the company’s flagship titles, including Brawl Stars, Clash of Clans and Clash Royale, preventing players from logging into their accounts entirely. During that earlier outage, some players encountered error messages suggesting a server-side failure, and many expressed concern on social media that their game progress or account data might have been lost entirely, before Supercell’s development teams confirmed the issue was tied to a backend server problem rather than any loss of player data.

Supercell has historically addressed major service disruptions by posting updates directly through the official social media accounts associated with each affected game, a pattern that has continued through subsequent outages affecting the company’s titles. As of Thursday morning, it remained unclear whether Supercell had issued a specific public statement addressing the cause of the reported access issues, or whether the disruption was tied directly to the rollout of Season 54 content rather than a separate, unrelated technical problem.

Independent, crowdsourced outage-tracking services that monitor Brawl Stars on a rolling basis had shown the game operating normally in the days immediately preceding Thursday’s reports, with one tracker recording just six user-submitted reports over the preceding 24-hour period as of Sept. 1, none of which occurred within the final hour of that monitoring window. That relatively low baseline level of reported issues makes Thursday’s spike in complaints, and the accompanying trending hashtag, a notable departure from the game’s recent pattern of reliability heading into the new season’s launch.

Brawl Stars, first released globally in 2018, has grown into one of Supercell’s most commercially successful titles, generating tens of millions of dollars in monthly in-app purchase revenue worldwide at its peak, according to industry data tracking the game’s performance. The game features fast-paced, short-format multiplayer battles in which players select from a roster of characters, known as Brawlers, each possessing unique abilities, and compete across a variety of game modes ranging from team-based objectives to free-for-all combat formats.

Seasonal content updates, such as the Season 54 rollout anticipated to coincide with Thursday’s reported disruption, typically introduce new Brawlers, cosmetic items, gameplay modes, and balance adjustments intended to keep the game’s competitive landscape fresh for its large base of active players. Because these updates often require significant backend changes to the game’s servers, brief periods of downtime or degraded performance immediately surrounding a major seasonal transition are relatively common across live-service mobile games more broadly, not just titles published by Supercell specifically.

For affected players experiencing access issues Thursday, standard troubleshooting guidance for Brawl Stars connectivity problems typically includes verifying an active and stable internet connection, restarting the game application, checking for and installing any pending app updates through the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, and clearing the application’s cache if the game continues to freeze or display error messages. Players are also generally advised against uninstalling the app entirely unless their game progress is confirmed to be linked to a Supercell ID account, since progress tied only to local device storage could otherwise be lost in the process of reinstalling.

As of Thursday late morning, it remained unclear how long the reported access issues would persist, or whether the disruption stemmed directly from the anticipated Season 54 content rollout, a separate unrelated technical issue, or a combination of both factors coinciding at once. Affected players were advised to monitor Brawl Stars’ official social media channels, along with independent outage trackers like Downdetector, for updates on when normal service would be fully restored following the game’s transition into its newest season.

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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Nvidia Corp. confirmed Thursday that it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, one of the world’s most widely used platforms for sharing and deploying open-source artificial intelligence models, in a deal valued at roughly $13 billion, extending the chipmaker’s push into the AI software and model ecosystem.

According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Nvidia entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face on Sept. 2. The transaction includes an approximately $11.9 billion purchase price payable to Hugging Face stockholders, subject to certain adjustments, along with an equity-based retention program of up to approximately $1.0 billion for Hugging Face employees joining Nvidia. The total deal value has been widely reported at $12.93 billion. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

Hugging Face operates a platform and community for developing, sharing and deploying open-source models, datasets and applications. According to Nvidia, more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators currently use the platform to share more than 3 million models, while more than 200,000 companies use Hugging Face to discover and deploy AI tools. The platform additionally hosts roughly 500,000 datasets and around 1 million applications, according to figures cited by TechCrunch.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang framed the acquisition as an extension of the company’s broader commitment to keeping AI development open and accessible, rather than as an effort to control or restrict how developers use the platform going forward.

“Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” Huang wrote in a statement announcing the deal.

Huang emphasized that Nvidia intends to preserve Hugging Face’s open, vendor-neutral character even under new ownership, addressing concerns that the acquisition might steer developers toward exclusively using Nvidia’s own computing hardware.

“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang said. “Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”

Nvidia’s SEC filing echoed that commitment in more formal terms, stating that the company has committed to keep Hugging Face’s platform open, “consistent with Hugging Face’s existing practices,” and that under this commitment, Hugging Face would continue to permit model makers, developers and users to upload and download models and datasets of their choosing, while continuing to support hardware from other silicon vendors beyond Nvidia’s own chips.

Huang also pointed to Nvidia’s existing contributions to the Hugging Face platform as evidence of the company’s long-standing support for open AI development, noting that Nvidia has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets through the platform, making it the largest single contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face to date.

Nvidia enterprise computing general manager Justin Boitano addressed the strategic rationale behind the deal during a call following the announcement, according to a Yahoo Finance report, indicating the company’s belief in the continued importance of open-model ecosystems to the broader AI industry’s development.

The deal comes roughly a year after Hugging Face turned down an earlier acquisition offer from Nvidia, reportedly worth around $500 million, in order to maintain its independence as a standalone company, according to reporting from the Financial Times. Hugging Face had more recently been generating approximately $150 million in annualized revenue, according to a report from The Information published last month, with company co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue telling TechCrunch in a July interview that the platform’s growth rate was helping it move “close to profitability” even before the Nvidia deal was finalized.

Huang has been an outspoken proponent of open-weight AI models throughout the past year, including authoring an essay in July advocating for open models as a strategic asset for the United States in its broader AI competition with rivals including China. Huang has argued that widespread global adoption of open-weight models developed and hosted through platforms like Hugging Face strengthens American technological influence over the international AI ecosystem, a position he reiterated in Thursday’s announcement of the Hugging Face deal.

Thursday’s acquisition adds to a series of recent moves by Nvidia to deepen its position across the broader AI technology stack, extending well beyond its core business of designing computing chips. Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia struck a $6 billion deal with coding startup Poolside to help develop open AI models. During its most recent earnings call, Nvidia disclosed that it has invested more than $50 billion into various AI infrastructure and ecosystem partnerships. The company has also separately committed to partnering with multiple Wall Street investment firms to deploy more than $500 billion in third-party capital toward the broader buildout of AI infrastructure.

Market reaction to Thursday’s confirmation was modestly positive, with Nvidia shares gaining close to 2% during the first hour of Thursday’s trading session, according to Yahoo Finance. Analyst commentary following the announcement characterized the deal’s price tag as a relatively modest expenditure relative to Nvidia’s overall financial scale. Speaking to Yahoo Finance, one analyst identified as Doran noted that Nvidia’s free cash flow is projected to reach nearly $200 billion for its fiscal year 2027, characterizing the roughly $13 billion purchase price as “not a big bite” relative to the company’s overall balance sheet.

That same analyst suggested the acquisition reflects Nvidia’s effort to diversify its business ahead of an eventual moderation in chip demand growth, even as current demand for Nvidia’s core hardware products remains extremely strong. “Right now, chip … demand is huge, but they are positioning themselves for the day when that will slow down,” the analyst said, adding that such a slowdown “still looks like it’s far in the future. But that will happen at some point.”

The Hugging Face acquisition follows Nvidia’s participation earlier this week at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Huang and other technology leaders addressed broader questions surrounding AI’s economic impact and infrastructure requirements. With the deal now confirmed and expected to close within the first half of 2027, Nvidia’s move to bring one of the AI industry’s most widely used open-source platforms under its ownership marks one of the company’s most significant acquisitions to date, further cementing its expanding influence across both the hardware and software layers of the global AI ecosystem.

REDMOND, Wash. — Shares of Microsoft Corp. climbed sharply Thursday, rising $16.04, or 3.23%, to $512.86 as of 11:19 a.m. ET, as investors responded positively to a broader market rally alongside the company’s announcement that it will begin disclosing standalone quarterly revenue figures for its Azure cloud business for the first time.

Microsoft unveiled the reporting change Wednesday as part of its most significant overhaul of financial disclosure since 2015, consolidating its three existing operating segments into two new groupings: Agents and Infra, and Devices and Consumer. The updated structure is set to take effect with the company’s fiscal first-quarter results this fall.

Under the new framework, the Agents and Infra segment will merge Azure and server products with Microsoft 365 business software, consolidating the company’s cloud, productivity, developer, security, consulting and support operations into a single reportable unit. The Devices and Consumer segment, meanwhile, will bring together Windows, Xbox gaming, and a unified search and advertising business that now includes LinkedIn Marketing Solutions and premium subscriptions.

The centerpiece of the change is Microsoft’s decision to finally disclose actual dollar figures for Azure’s quarterly revenue, ending more than a decade in which the company shared only year-over-year growth percentages for the business rather than concrete sales totals. That practice had long frustrated analysts attempting to model the true scale of Azure relative to rivals Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, both of which report specific quarterly revenue figures for their respective cloud platforms.

According to figures disclosed alongside the restructuring announcement, Azure generated $29.42 billion in revenue during the quarter ending in June, a 42% increase from the same period a year earlier, and surpassed $100 billion in cumulative sales for the full 2026 fiscal year. Notably, the restructured Azure reporting will exclude GitHub cloud services, Security Copilot and healthcare cloud solutions, offerings that had previously been folded into Azure’s growth metrics under the prior reporting structure.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella explained the rationale behind the broader reorganization in materials accompanying the announcement, tying the change directly to the growing influence of artificial intelligence across the company’s product lines.

“It is changing what we build and how we operate, and it is blurring the boundaries between our products,” Nadella said, referring to AI’s transformative effect on the company’s business.

Azure has emerged as one of the primary beneficiaries of the broader artificial intelligence boom, as enterprise customers increasingly turn to major cloud infrastructure platforms to access the computing power needed to build and deploy AI models and agents. Analysts at Stifel estimated in July that roughly half of Azure’s revenue growth during fiscal 2026 stemmed from Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, while rival AI developer Anthropic has also become increasingly reliant on Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure.

The new Agents and Infra segment will also give investors a clearer view into Microsoft’s expanding AI assistant portfolio. The company disclosed in July that it had surpassed 30 million paid licenses for Microsoft 365 Copilot, up from more than 20 million reported in April, reflecting rapid growth in enterprise adoption of the company’s AI-powered productivity tools.

Thursday’s stock gain builds on additional positive momentum for Microsoft heading into the reporting change. Bank of America research analyst Tal Liani recently upgraded his outlook on the stock, arguing that investors have been underestimating how effectively Microsoft is differentiating itself within the broader artificial intelligence competitive landscape.

Wall Street’s overall sentiment toward Microsoft has remained strongly positive. Analysts maintain a consensus “Strong Buy” rating on the stock, with price targets ranging from roughly $568 to $592, implying meaningful additional upside from current trading levels according to some estimates.

Thursday’s gains also came amid a broadly positive session for the overall stock market, with major indexes advancing as Treasury yields eased and technology stocks benefited from renewed investor enthusiasm tied to Nvidia’s confirmed $12.93 billion acquisition of AI platform Hugging Face, announced the same day. Microsoft is among the seven major technology stocks tracked within a widely followed equal-weighted “Magnificent Seven” exchange-traded fund, alongside Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Nvidia and Tesla, several of which also posted gains Thursday amid the broader rally in AI-linked technology names.

Microsoft’s stock performance has been notably volatile throughout 2026. Shares were down more than 20% for the year prior to the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report in late July, which triggered a sharp rally after Microsoft reported $90 billion in quarterly revenue, an 18% increase from the same period a year earlier, alongside profit growth of 31% compared with the prior-year quarter. That earnings-driven surge added roughly $450 billion to Microsoft’s market value in a single session, pushing the company’s market capitalization to approximately $3.4 trillion and making it the fourth-largest company in the world by that measure at the time.

Despite that rebound, Microsoft shares remained roughly 5% below the all-time high the stock had established roughly a year earlier, even after the post-earnings surge. The stock’s recovery this year has come even as the company continues navigating cost pressures tied to its aggressive artificial intelligence infrastructure spending, including a previously announced reduction of 4,800 employees, representing roughly 2.1% of Microsoft’s global workforce, disclosed earlier this year in a memo from Amy Coleman, the company’s executive vice president and chief people officer.

In fiscal year 2026 overall, Microsoft reported total revenue of $331.84 billion, an increase of 17.79% compared with the prior year, while earnings rose 31.34% to $133.75 billion, according to data compiled by financial analysts tracking the company’s performance.

With the new two-segment reporting structure and standalone Azure disclosure set to take effect alongside Microsoft’s fiscal first-quarter earnings report this October, investors will gain their first detailed, dollar-based look at the true scale of Azure’s business performance relative to its major cloud competitors, a level of transparency Wall Street has sought from Microsoft for years. Analysts and investors will likely be watching closely to see how the newly disclosed figures compare against market expectations, and whether the added transparency reinforces or complicates the broader bullish narrative that has driven Microsoft shares higher in recent months.

Pardon me from again borrowing from my G20 interview with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Yet I really want to repeat my view that the most powerful news story, however unreported, is the emergence of an economic boom that is now cutting across every sector of the landscape.

And here is more of what Mr. Bessent said to me in response to my growthier point of view: “And as you said, the president’s policies have laid the groundwork for this economy. So we have regulatory certainty. The president tasked this administration with cutting the regulatory burden, and that’s part of what we’re talking about here today.”

That’s the important regulatory side of the economic boom. By the way, that includes drill, baby, drill, where we are now producing almost 14 million barrels of oil per day, which is an extraordinary number. Plus, record natural gas and liquefied natural gas exports around the world, where Trumpian policies have made America the energy capital of the globe.

And then there’s a tax policy that the press doesn’t really want to write about. Yet perhaps the single most underrated yet powerful policy, is the permanent restoration of 100 percent bonus depreciation to deduct the full cost of qualifying investments, immediately in year one. Anything, machinery, equipment, restaurants, tech startups; small businesses can deduct even more up front than ever before.

This is an enormous part of the AI boom and the data center construction boom, which like the factories of old, is creating massive new job opportunities in manufacturing for working folks, like carpenters, welders, electricians, and plumbers. And counter to the doomsday crowd, these data centers generate their own electricity, their own water systems, they pay more in taxes, and they allow localities to even cut property taxes along the way. And let’s not forget tax-free tips, tax-free overtime, and roughly $300 billion in individual refunds during the latest tax season.

Just today, we got new numbers on the productivity of nonfinancial companies, which is now running at 3.1 percent annually over the past two years, an unheard of accomplishment. Nothing like it since the 1990s. And the manufacturing indexes from the Institute for Supply Management are up for eight months in a row. While the service indexes are up 15 months in a row.

There is a boom out there, folks, and that’s the story that Secretary Bessent has been telling us. If only the press would listen.

UPDATE From CloudFLare: “Cloudflare is not experiencing any significant service disruptions at this time. Our services are operating normally, and any reporting that deviates from this is incorrect” (11:58 AM Thursday, September 3, 2026 Eastern Time (ET)

Users began reporting access problems tied to Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure and security company that powers a significant portion of the global web, starting around 11:12 a.m. EDT Thursday, according to outage-tracking site Downdetector.

The outage tracker’s official account flagged the surge in user complaints shortly after the reports began, asking affected users how the disruption was impacting them and directing people to its live outage dashboard for further updates. The hashtag “CloudflareDown” began circulating on social media as users compared notes on the issue.

Cloudflare, which provides content delivery, network security and performance services for websites across the internet, has experienced a documented pattern of intermittent issues over the past several days, according to independent status-tracking services. StatusGator’s monitoring data shows Cloudflare’s overall status has registered a “warning” condition, indicating degraded rather than fully unavailable service, continuously across much of the past two weeks, with periods ranging from several hours to nearly a full day at a stretch. That same tracker recorded a brief, fully “down” incident lasting 19 minutes on Sept. 1, along with a separate documented incident early Thursday morning, at 1:55 a.m., described as an “HTTP/3 issue affecting R2 custom domains,” which lasted approximately one minute.

Other independent monitoring services have painted a similarly turbulent picture of Cloudflare’s recent reliability. One tracker, IncidentHub, reported that Cloudflare had recorded 76 separate outages across 49 different components over the trailing 30-day period, with specific services including its R2 object storage product and WARP VPN service flagged as affected in recent status checks, even as other Cloudflare offerings, including its AI Gateway and AI Search products, continued showing as operational.

Because Cloudflare provides infrastructure services to an estimated 20% of websites globally, according to industry estimates, disruptions affecting the company’s network have historically produced outsized, highly visible ripple effects across the broader internet, often taking down or degrading access to major platforms that rely on Cloudflare for content delivery, security filtering or domain name resolution services.

Cloudflare has experienced several major, high-profile outages over the past year that illustrate the scale of disruption the company’s infrastructure problems can cause. In November 2025, a significant outage affecting Cloudflare’s core network took down or degraded access to a wide range of major websites and platforms, including social media platform X, artificial intelligence company OpenAI’s services, and music streaming service Spotify. Cloudflare later published a detailed internal account of that incident, describing the resulting downtime as unacceptable given the company’s central role in the internet’s infrastructure.

“We are sorry for the impact to our customers and to the Internet in general,” Cloudflare wrote in its public postmortem addressing the November incident. “Given Cloudflare’s importance in the Internet ecosystem any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable. That there was a period of time where our network was not able to route traffic is deeply painful to every member of our team.”

Cloudflare’s account of the November outage traced the root cause to a software issue in which the company’s systems began loading an incorrect internal feature file, triggering a spike in server error responses across its network. The company said other systems dependent on its core proxy infrastructure, including its Workers KV data storage product and Cloudflare Access authentication service, were also affected during that incident, with engineers ultimately implementing a patch to bypass the core proxy for Workers KV in order to reduce the broader impact.

Just weeks later, in December 2025, Cloudflare experienced another significant disruption, which the company again publicly acknowledged with a similarly apologetic tone in its subsequent incident report.

“Any outage of our systems is unacceptable, and we know we have let the Internet down again following the incident on November 18,” Cloudflare wrote regarding the December incident, which the company traced to changes made to its Web Application Firewall buffer size settings as part of an unrelated security effort to protect customers from a critical vulnerability affecting React-based applications.

A separate major incident in February 2026 affected customers using Cloudflare’s Bring Your Own IP service, a feature that allows customers to route their own internet address blocks through Cloudflare’s network. During that incident, a configuration change unintentionally caused a portion of customer IP address routes to be withdrawn from the internet’s global routing tables, rendering affected customer websites and applications unreachable for several hours. Cloudflare said that incident was not caused by any cyberattack or malicious activity, but rather stemmed from an internal change to how the company managed IP addresses onboarded through its Bring Your Own IP pipeline.

As of Thursday morning, it remained unclear whether the reports beginning at 11:12 a.m. EDT were connected to any of the previously logged incidents affecting Cloudflare’s infrastructure this week, or represented a separate, newly emerging disruption. Cloudflare had not issued a specific public statement addressing the cause of Thursday’s reported access issues as of the time affected users began flagging problems on social media.

For website owners and businesses that rely on Cloudflare for their online infrastructure, standard guidance during a suspected outage typically involves first confirming whether the underlying issue originates with Cloudflare itself or with a customer’s own origin server, by checking Cloudflare’s official status page for any acknowledged incidents. If Cloudflare’s status page shows all systems operational despite continued site inaccessibility, the underlying problem more likely lies with a customer’s own hosting provider rather than with Cloudflare’s network directly. In situations where Cloudflare’s infrastructure is confirmed to be the source of a disruption, affected website operators can sometimes mitigate the impact by temporarily enabling Development Mode within their Cloudflare dashboard or by pausing Cloudflare services entirely, routing traffic directly to their origin servers instead.

As of Thursday late morning, it remained unclear how long the newly reported access issues would persist or how broadly they might affect websites and services relying on Cloudflare’s infrastructure. Affected users were advised to monitor both Downdetector’s live outage dashboard and Cloudflare’s official status page for updates as the company worked to identify and address the underlying cause of the disruption.