Major outage at Cloudflare knocks X and ChatGPT offline

A widespread internet disruption occurred on Tuesday, affecting several major websites, including X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT, due to problems at the core internet infrastructure provider, Cloudflare.

Thousands of users reported issues to the outage monitoring site Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT.

Cloudflare confirmed the incident, stating it had observed "a spike in unusual traffic" beginning at 11:20 UTC to one of its services. This surge led to errors for traffic routed through its extensive network. 

While the cause of the unusual traffic was initially unknown, the company activated an immediate response team to resolve the issue.

As services began to normalize, Cloudflare announced it had "deployed a change which has restored dashboard services." However, the firm noted that some customers might still experience "higher-than-normal error rates" as remediation efforts continued.

During the downtime X's homepage displayed an internal server problem, attributing the original "error" to Cloudflare, and ChatGPT's site presented an error message asking some users to "unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed."

Even Downdetector, a primary resource during outages, reportedly displayed an error message to frustrated users.

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is a massive global provider of internet security and content delivery. It offers services like protecting sites from bots and malicious attacks (such as denial-of-service, or DoS attacks). It claims that 20% of all websites worldwide utilize its services in some capacity.

Alp Toker, director of NetBlocks, described the event as a "catastrophic disruption to Cloudflare's infrastructure." He highlighted that while Cloudflare's services are crucial for protecting sites against attacks, its widespread adoption makes it "one of the internet's largest single points of failure."

This incident is the latest in a series of major outages, following issues that impacted Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure in recent months.

Jake Moore, a global cybersecurity advisor at ESET, commented that these recurring outages "have once again highlighted the reliance on these fragile networks." He noted that companies often have no choice but to rely heavily on a small group of providers like Cloudflare, Microsoft, and Amazon for their essential website hosting and services.