Several high-profile websites, including X and ChatGPT, experienced widespread outages on Tuesday due to technical problems at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare.
Thousands of users reported difficulties accessing the affected sites on outage-monitoring platform Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT. Cloudflare said it had observed “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC,” which caused errors for traffic passing through its network.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the company said, adding that teams were working to restore services. Later in the day, Cloudflare confirmed that it had “deployed a change which has restored dashboard services” as many websites began returning to normal.
Some X users saw an error message on the site indicating a problem with its internal server linked to Cloudflare, while ChatGPT users received messages prompting them to “unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed.” The company noted that the disruption “potentially impacts multiple customers” and warned that some services might continue to experience higher-than-normal error rates during ongoing remediation efforts.
Cloudflare provides a range of internet security and performance services, including verifying that visitor traffic is human rather than automated. The company says its services are used in some form by around 20 percent of all websites worldwide. The full extent of Tuesday’s outage, including the number of sites affected, is still unclear.
Downdetector itself was also affected, displaying error messages as users tried to access the service to report issues. Alp Toker, director of NetBlocks, which monitors internet connectivity, described the outage as “a catastrophic disruption to Cloudflare’s infrastructure.” He noted that while Cloudflare protects websites from attacks and helps manage heavy traffic, it has also become “one of the internet’s largest single points of failure.”
The incident follows recent disruptions at other major web service providers. Last month, an Amazon Web Services outage took more than 1,000 websites and apps offline, and Microsoft Azure experienced technical issues shortly afterward.
“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.”
Tuesday’s disruption underscored how dependent the internet has become on a small number of infrastructure providers and highlighted the potential risks of a single point of failure for large portions of online services.
