A major outage affecting internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare has disrupted access to several high-profile websites, including X and ChatGPT, for thousands of users worldwide.
Reports of service interruptions began appearing on outage monitoring site Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT on Tuesday. Users experienced errors when trying to access the affected platforms.
In a statement, Cloudflare confirmed it had observed “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC,” which led to errors for traffic passing through its network. The company added: “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.”
X’s homepage displayed a message for some users indicating a problem with its internal server, citing an “error” originating from Cloudflare. Similarly, ChatGPT users encountered an error message prompting them to “please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed.”
The outage highlights the growing reliance of major online services on a few central internet infrastructure providers and the potential global impact when those systems experience disruptions.
