Major Internet Services Disrupted by Cloudflare Outage

On Tuesday, users of ChatGPT and social network X faced access issues due to a significant outage affecting Cloudflare Inc., a web security company. As reported by Bloomberg,
Cloudflare was investigating a situation that “could potentially impact many customers.” They noted experiencing issues with their customer support portal and were planning scheduled maintenance in certain regions. At one point, their website showing outage status was also down.
About an hour after the outage began, Cloudflare announced they were “seeing service recovery,” but cautioned customers that they may continue to experience “higher than normal error rates as we work through the troubleshooting.”
Cloudflare's software is utilized by hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide, acting as a buffer between their websites and end-users while protecting them from traffic overload attacks.
The Cloudflare system has faced outages before. In July 2019, a software glitch caused a part of its network to exhaust computing resources, leading to the downtime of thousands of websites for 30 minutes. Services affected included Medium, Discord, SoundCloud, Coinbase, and Dropbox. In June 2022, another outage impacted traffic in 19 of its data centers, affecting a large portion of global traffic and resulting in the shutdown of several major websites and services for about an hour and a half.