Cloudflare resolves issue causing ChatGPT, X and more internet service outages

Internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare says it has implemented a fix and believes it resolved the issue that caused global outages for ChatGPT, social media platform X, transit infrastructure and other internet services.

“A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” the latest update, which came around 9:45 a.m. Tuesday, said.

Cloudflare said on its status page earlier Tuesday that it was aware of and investigating an issue impacting multiple customers. There were reports of 500 errors, as well as Cloudflare Dashboard and API failing.

“We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly,” the company said in a statement.

Issues became more widespread, with more than 10,000 reports. Users reported X was down, along with ChatGPT. Instead of the websites, users were prompted to “unblock challenges.cloudflare.com.”

At one point, even DownDetector.com was down. Websites like NJ Transit’s also had problems.

Cloudflare did have scheduled maintenance for the SCL (Santiago) data center for Tuesday.

Cloudflare is a prominent internet hub providing network and security products for internet service providers. Some cybersecurity experts have warned for years about the potentially ugly consequences of allowing a handful of big tech companies to underpin the online world’s plumbing.

Last month, an outage with another internet infrastructure giant, Amazon Web Services, caused problems around the world, affecting social media, financial, streaming and gaming platforms.

Also in October, Microsoft had to deploy a fix to address an outage of their Azure cloud portal that left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft and other services. The tech company wrote on its Azure status page that a configuration change to its Azure infrastructure caused the outage.