Cloudflare Down Highlights: Cloudflare says it resolved global outage that took down ChatGPT, X and others

Cloudflare Down LIVE: Cloudflare is one of the biggest networks operating company and is used by many websites to keep speed up their service and protect them from online attacks. The platform acts as a middle layer between websites and the people trying to access them.

Since Cloudflare supports a number of companies, a technical issue on its end can lead to outages on multiple unrelated platforms.

Lates update from Cloudflare read: “Cloudflare is currently investigating issues related to IPsec tunnels in Magic Transit and Magic WAN products. We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly.”

The chart shows the volume of 5xx error HTTP status codes served by the Cloudflare network. Normally, this should be very low, and it was right up until the start of the outage.

A widespread internet outage struck several global digital platforms on Tuesday, leaving millions of users unable to access services like X, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, Google Cloud, and Canva.

Popular gaming titles League of Legends and Valorant were also impacted.

The latest outage spotlights the importance of seemingly mundane internet infrastructure to the "AI Revolution", according to Cornell University Tech Policy Institute director Sarah Kreps.

"The issue exposes the reality that this multi-billion, even trillion dollar investment in AI is only as reliable as its least scrutinized third party infrastructure," Kreps said.

Knecht put out word on X that by day's end Cloudflare will share details of what went wrong along with what the company plans to do to make sure it doesn't happen again.

The CloudFlare outage is the latest in a trend of infrastructure providers going offline and taking swaths of the internet with them, according to Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne.

"We're seeing outages happen more frequently, and they're taking longer to fix," Bourne said.

"That's a symptom of strained infrastructure: increased AI load, streaming demand, and aging capacity all pushing systems past the edge."

Cloudfare said that the outage was triggered by a change to one of its database systems' permissions, which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by the Bot Management system. “That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.”

On Wall Street, Cloudflare fell 2.8% after an earlier issue at the internet infrastructure provider caused global outages for ChatGPT and other services.

• British Airways IAG-owned British Airways
• Alphabet
• Fastly
• Akamai
• Meta
• X Corp
• Crowdstrike

Cloudflare provides a range of services that were affected during an incident starting around 12:00 UTC, impacting systems that rely on its CDN, DDoS protection, and DNS offerings. Its Content Delivery Network (CDN) caches website data on servers worldwide to reduce load times, while its DDoS protection shields websites from malicious or overwhelming traffic. Cloudflare’s DNS services ensure users are directed to the correct IP addresses, and its security and firewall solutions filter out harmful requests to protect websites.

Under typical conditions, Cloudflare uses the domain challenges.cloudflare.com to confirm that a visitor is human rather than a malicious bot, as per reports. This is where its “Turnstile” technology, the checkboxes asking users to verify they are human, is located. Usually, error messages related to this process appear only if a user has an aggressive ad-blocker, a privacy extension (such as Privacy Badger or uBlock Origin), or a DNS filter that blocks the verification script from loading.

Cloudflare is a global cloud services and cybersecurity company. It offers data centers, website and email security, protection against data loss, and defenses against cyber threats, among other services. The company describes itself as providing an “immune system for the internet", with technology positioned between its clients and the wider internet to block billions of cyber threats each day. Additionally, it leverages its global infrastructure to accelerate internet traffic.

X

Spotify

ChatGPT

Perplexity

Amazon Web Services

Canva

Letterboxd

Sage

PayPal

League of Legends

Archive of our Own

Genshin Impact

Honkai: Star Rail

Spotify

Claude AI

The disruption affected a variety of platforms, including Canva, Spotify, Perplexity and ChatGPT. As per reports, Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht later explained that “a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made”.

Three years after a 2019 software bug, Cloudflare experienced another outage in June 2022, affecting 19 of its data centers and causing a roughly 90-minute disruption to major websites and services globally, Bloomberg reported.

Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that Cloudflare’s share fell 2.3% after a major hours-long outage disrupted several major services, including X, ChatGPT and Perplexity.

The Cloudfare stated that the disruption, which started at about 6:30 am, ET, was triggered by an automatically created configuration file intended to address potential security threats, according to Reuters.

Cloudflare Down LIVE: On its status page, Cloudflare wrote, “The team is continuing to focus on restoring service post-fix. We are mitigating several issues that remain post-deployment.”

Cloudflare Down LIVE: Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht while explaining the reason behind the recent outage in his X post, wrote, “In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack.”

Cloudflare Down LIVE: Cloudflare CTO while talking about the recent outage in a post on X wrote, "I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused."

Cloudflare Down LIVE: In a status page, Cloudflare claims that it has fixed the issue and is continuing to monitor for errors.

“A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.” the company wrote

Cloudflare Down LIVE: Just a month back, Elon Musk mocked the AWS outage that took down half the platform and talked about the virtues of his platform but as it turns out the current Cloudflare outage has taken X down as well.

“Messages on X chat are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange ‘AWS dependencies,’ so I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head,” Musk had wrote in a post on X.

Cloudflare Down LIVE: In a post on its status page, Cloudflare wrote, “We've deployed a change which has restored dashboard services. We are still working to remediate broad application services impact”

Cloudflare Down LIVE:

X

Spotify

ChatGPT

Perplexity

Amazon Web Services

Canva

Letterboxd

Sage

PayPal

League of Legends

Archive of our Own

Genshin Impact

Honkai: Star Rail

Spotify

Claude AI

Cloudflare Down LIVE: The problem with Cloudflare outage seems to be spreading to new websites as a lot of new names are being added to the outage list on Downdetector including Ikea, Azure, Microsoft Teams, Square, Claude, Canva, Uber, League of Legends and Spotify

Cloudflare Down LIVE: In a statement to The Guardian, a Cloudflare spokesperson said, “We saw a spike 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.” they added

Cloudflare Down LIVE: While many people would assume that users flock to Threads to check details about the X outage, that doesn't seem to be backed by data.

As per Search Atlas, after the X outage, Google Trends data shows that users flocked to Bluesky instead of Threads or Mastodon to check whether the platform is working or not.

Cloudflare Down LIVE: Cloudflare has issued a new update on the outage efforts. The company wrote in its status page, “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. We have re-enabled WARP access in London.”

Cloudflare Down LIVE: Downdetector data and multiple posts on Reddit suggest that the following video games may have been impacted due to th recent Cloudflare outage: League of Legends, Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail.

Cloudflare Down LIVE: “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.” the company updated on its status page

Cloudflare Down LIVE: We don't have a confirmed list of websites affected by the outage but some of the platforms that users are reporting problems with accessing currently are Perplexity, Chat GPT, X and Gemini