ChatGPT, X, Canva among major websites affected by Cloudflare outage: What we know so far

Apart from X, several major websites, including ChatGPT, Letterboxd, Perplexity, Canva and Uber were those affected.

Several websites and internet applications, including X, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Cloudflare, was down for thousands of users globally amid a massive outage.

A 3D-printed miniature model of Elon Musk and the X logo are seen in this illustration. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo (REUTERS)

The outage, that major internet platforms inaccessible globally, was caused due to technical glitch in web-infrastructure firm Cloudflare.

X, the microblogging platform owned by Elon Musk, suffered global disruption, leaving thousands of users, including those in India, unable to load posts and feed. Apart from X, several major websites, including ChatGPT, Letterboxd, Perplexity, Canva, Uber, and some multiplayer games were among the ones affected.

Follow the latest updates on Cloudfare outage

Here are the latest updates on the massive technical outage:

• Outage tracking website Downdetector saw a massive spike in reports, logging over 10,000 complaints for several websites and applications. Downdetector.come also struggled to load, becoming a victim of the outage.
• The websites hit by the outage include: Canva, OpenAI, Spotify, X, Grindr, Uber, Spotify and Dayforce. This was the second major internet disruption this year, weeks after the malfunction of Amazon's cloud services unit AWS in October.
• Cloudflare said on its status page that it was aware of and investigating an issue that was impacting multiple customers. A Cloudflare spokesperson said the company observed a “spike in unusual traffic” to one of its services on Tuesday, causing some traffic passing through its network to experience errors.
• “We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson said. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
• Web security firm Cloudflare's software is used by hundreds of thousands of companies across the world. It acts as a buffer between the websites and end users and works to protect the sites from attacks that might overload them with traffic.
• There were more than 5,600 reports of issues with X as of 5:20 pm, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages.
• Several users took to other social media platforms to report the widespread disruption. Over 1300 users in India also reported outages on the microblogging site.