Cloudflare outage takes down X and ChatGPT

A number of high-profile websites, including X and ChatGPT, went down for many on Tuesday, due to problems affecting major internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare.

Thousands of users began reporting issues with the sites, as well as other services, to outage monitoring site Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT.

Cloudflare said in a statement it had seen "a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare's services beginning at 11:20 UTC" which had caused errors for traffic passing through its network.

"We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic," it said, adding "we are all hands-on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors."

Later, as many internet services started to return to normal, the firm said it had "deployed a change which has restored dashboard services."

On its homepage, X was displaying a message for some users saying there was a problem with its internal server, as a result of an "error" originating with Cloudflare.

ChatGPT's site was also displaying an error message telling some users: "please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed."

The error message which greets ChatGPT users appeared on a number of sites during Tuesday's outage, including Downdetector.

Cloudflare said in an earlier note on its service status dashboard that the issues it was experiencing "potentially impacts multiple customers".

In updates since it added it was "seeing services recover" but some customers "may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts".

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is a huge provider of internet security across the world, carrying out services such as checking visitor connections to sites are coming from humans rather than bots.

It says 20% of all websites worldwide use its services in some form.

It is unclear how many of those websites have been affected by this outage, and to what extent.

Downdetector itself - a site many flock to when sites stop loading or appear to have issues - also displayed an error message as many tried to access it on Tuesday.

Alp Toker, director of NetBlocks, which monitors the connectivity of web services, said the outage "points to a catastrophic disruption to Cloudflare's infrastructure".

"What's striking is how much of the internet has had to hide behind Cloudflare infrastructure to avoid denial of service attacks in recent years," he told the BBC - highlighting how the company aims to protect sites against malicious attempts to overwhelm them with traffic requests.

He said that however, as a result of this - and the convenience of its services - it had also become "one of the internet's largest single points of failure."

Issues affecting Cloudflare's services come after an outage impacting Amazon Web Services last month saw more than 1,000 sites and apps knocked offline.

Another major web services provider, Microsoft Azure, was also affected shortly afterwards.

"The outages we have witnessed these last few months have once again highlighted the reliance on these fragile networks," said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET.

"Companies are often forced to heavily rely on the likes of Cloudflare, Microsoft, and Amazon for hosting their websites and services, as there aren't many other options."

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