San Francisco: Several major websites, including X and ChatGPT, faced widespread outages on November 18, after issues emerged at Cloudflare, a major global internet infrastructure and security provider. The disruption began shortly after 11:30 GMT, when thousands started reporting problems on Downdetector as multiple apps and services became inaccessible.
Cloudflare confirmed that a ‘significant outage’ occurred when a configuration file, intended to help manage threat traffic, malfunctioned and caused a crash in the software that routes traffic across its broader services.
The company apologised publicly and stated that, “We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today,” and acknowledged that, given the importance of its services, any outage is ‘unacceptable.’ While the core issue has been fixed, Cloudflare warned that some platforms may continue to experience errors as systems fully recover.
A wide array of websites and apps were affected. Users encountered delays and technical issues on platforms such as Grindr, Zoom and Canva. X displayed an internal server error linked to Cloudflare, while ChatGPT users saw messages telling them, “Please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed.” Even Downdetector itself briefly showed error messages due to the widespread nature of the disruption.
What is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest providers of internet security and performance services. Its systems help verify that website visitors are real humans rather than bots, protect sites from cyberattacks, and optimise web traffic.
The company says that roughly 20 percent of all websites globally use its services. Because so many sites depend on Cloudflare for protection against denial-of-service attacks, it has become a central part of the internet’s infrastructure.
Cloudflare stressed that the outage was the result of a technical issue and not a cyberattack and highlighted that, “There is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity.” Following the disruption, Cloudflare’s share price dipped by about 3 percent shortly after 15:00 GMT.
This event follows other major outages in recent months. An Amazon Web Services failure last month knocked more than 1,000 websites and apps offline. Microsoft Azure also suffered disruptions soon after.
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