Major Internet Outage: Cloudflare Issues Disrupt X, ChatGPT, and Other Top Services
The web infrastructure giant is investigating widespread errors just one month after a similar AWS crash.
A major technical issue at web infrastructure provider Cloudflare caused widespread disruptions across the internet on Tuesday. The outage rendered several popular websites and services inaccessible, including X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and the film platform Letterboxd.
The trouble was first acknowledged early Tuesday morning. At 3:48 a.m. PT, Cloudflare updated its system status page to confirm they were aware of the problem.
According to the company’s statement, the issue caused “widespread 500 errors,” referring to a standard server error message that appears when a website cannot load. The company also noted that its own internal Dashboard and API tools were failing.
“We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem,” Cloudflare stated, adding that an investigation is currently underway to determine the root cause.
This incident has occurred just one month after Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a massive failure. The recent AWS outage caused significant downtime for major platforms such as Reddit, Snapchat, Roblox, and Fortnite.
These back-to-back disruptions have sparked a fresh debate about the structure of the internet. With so many websites relying on a small group of centralized service providers like Cloudflare and AWS, a single technical glitch can now bring down vast portions of the web instantly.
Cloudflare has promised further updates as they work to restore full service stability.
