A number of prominent websites, including X and ChatGPT, have experienced outages for some users due to issues affecting internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare. Reports of problems began to surface around 11:30 GMT on Tuesday, with thousands of users notifying outage monitoring site Downdetector.
Cloudflare acknowledged a “spike in unusual traffic” starting at 11:20 UTC, which led to errors affecting traffic on its network. The company stated that it is currently investigating the cause of the unusual traffic and is working to resolve the issues. On its status dashboard, Cloudflare noted that the situation “potentially impacts multiple customers” and mentioned that some users may continue to face elevated error rates as recovery efforts proceed.
Specific impacts were noted on X, where some users received an internal server error message linked to Cloudflare, and on the ChatGPT site, which prompted users to “please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed.” Downdetector, frequently used to track outages, also displayed errors as users attempted to access it.
Cloudflare plays a significant role in global internet security, providing services that verify whether site visitors are human rather than automated bots. The company reports that approximately 20% of all websites worldwide utilize its services, although it remains unclear how many sites were specifically affected by this incident.
Alp Toker, director of NetBlocks, described the outage as a significant disruption to Cloudflare’s infrastructure. He noted the reliance of many websites on Cloudflare for protection against denial of service attacks, which may contribute to its vulnerability as a single point of failure. This incident comes on the heels of a recent Amazon Web Services outage that impacted over 1,000 sites and apps, as well as subsequent issues with Microsoft Azure.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c629pny4gl7o?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss