E-Paper
What caused Cloudflare outage? Here's why X, ChatGPT and other popular websites are down
Cloudflare's outage on Tuesday rendered many websites, including X and ChatGPT, inaccessible. The company is aware of the issue and is investigating it.
Cloudflare, the web services provider, on Tuesday experienced an outage, which rendered numerous websites and services, including X, ChatGPT, and Letterboxd, inaccessible.
What caused Cloudflare outage?
At 3:48 a.m. PT, the company released a statement on its system status page indicating that it was aware of the issue and has started an investigation to know what caused the outage. “Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing,” the statement read. “We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly.”
Cloudflare outage follows just one month after Amazon Web Services suffered a similar failure, which caused significant disruption across the internet. The AWS outage impacted various sites, including Reddit, Snapchat, Roblox, and Fortnite, leading many to question the prudence and safety of relying on a few centralized services for such vast portions of the internet.
Later at 8:13 ET, Cloudflare stated “the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.” The firm continued that “we have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates.”
Meanwhile, a Cloudflare spokesperson spoke to The Guardian, confirming that they saw a surge in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20am. “That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. While most traffic for most services continued to flow as normal, there were elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services.”
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic,” the spokesperson added.
Also Read: Is Canva down? Designing platform affected by Cloudfare outage
Cloudflare sees signs of recovery
Many people were unable to access websites like Facebook, and bet365, even the tracking website Downdetector was unavailable.
In an update, the network said that they “are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
“We are continuing to investigate this issue,” they stated.
Meanwhile, internet users expressed their frustration on Reddit. One user wrote: “Cloudflare down? Twitter etc isn't working?”
“I came here specifically to see if this was the case lol. I never realised just how much stuff uses Cloudflare until things are down! I wonder what caused it!” another wrote.
