Cloudflare outage hits major services globally, including X and ChatGPT
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Cloudflare's global network recently faced significant issues, causing numerous websites and services to go offline.
The company has acknowledged the problem and is actively working to resolve it.
Platforms such as Elon Musk's microblogging site X, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Canva were among those inaccessible.
News websites, gaming platforms like Valorant and League of Legends, and the music streaming service Spotify also experienced disruption.
The outage began a short while ago.
Visitors to these sites saw an HTTP 500 error code, which is also known as an internal server error. This message explicitly pointed to an issue within Cloudflare's data centers, rather than problems with the origin hosts of the websites themselves.
The error messages indicated that the outage impacted Cloudflare's data centers in several regions, including Chennai, Mumbai, Frankfurt, and New Delhi.
The system status website for Cloudflare confirmed the company is "investigating the issue." The outage caused widespread HTTP 500 errors across many platforms, along with Cloudflare API and dashboard failures.
A notable consequence was that downtime tracking websites, such as Downdetector, were also affected. Since these sites rely on Cloudflare's data centers, they became inaccessible. The Downdetector.in website failed to load because the "challenges.cloudflare.com" domain, which presents visitors with a security challenge, was also offline during the disruption.
While Cloudflare stated that some services appear to be recovering, they warned that websites might still report "higher-than-normal error rates" as mitigation efforts continue. The company has apologised and is working to "understand the full impact and mitigate the problem."
This incident follows a major outage in October of this year involving Amazon Web Services (AWS). That event, which originated at a North Virginia data center, left over 1,000 services inaccessible for up to 12 hours. AWS later attributed that issue to a “Domain Name System (DNS) resolution issue for the regional DynamoDB service endpoints” and "apologised for the prolonged outage."