Widespread Cloudflare outage blocks X, ChatGPT websites

ChatGPT, social-media platform X and NJ Transit were among the websites blocking users’ access on Tuesday as the web security firm Cloudflare Inc worked to address a widespread, worldwide networking outage, according to Bloomberg.

Cloudflare was investigating an issue that “potentially impacts multiple customers”, the San Francisco-based company said on its website. The same page shows Cloudflare had been experiencing issues with a customer support portal, and had been scheduled to conduct scheduled maintenance in some areas earlier in the day. At one point, Cloudflare’s own outage status website wasn’t loading.

About an hour into the disruption, Cloudflare said it was “seeing services recover” but warned customers would continue to see “higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts”. As of 8am New York time, the company said it was “continuing to investigate”.

Cloudflare’s software is used by hundreds of thousands of companies globally, acting as a buffer between their websites and end users and working to protect their sites from attacks that might overload them with traffic.

Cloudflare’s system has gone down — multiple times — before. In July 2019, a bug in its software caused one part of its network to suck up computing resources from the rest of the company, leading thousands of websites around the world that rely on Cloudflare to go offline for as long as 30 minutes. During that outage, services including the blogging platform Medium, the video game chat provider Discord, Shopify Inc, music service SoundCloud Ltd, Bitcoin trading platform Coinbase Inc and online storage site Dropbox Inc were affected.

In June 2022, Cloudflare suffered an outage that affected traffic in 19 of its data centres handling a significant proportion of its global traffic, also essentially shutting down several major websites and services. The incident lasted for about an hour and a half.

“Cloudflare is the biggest company you’ve never heard of,” said Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at University of Surrey, adding that the outage was another example of the internet’s reliance on “relatively few players”.

“People have no choice but to depend on relatively few big names,” he said.

In a notice sent just after 8am New York time, New Jersey Transit said both its website and its mobile app were affected by the Cloudflare outage and warned that services may be temporarily unavailable or slow.

Moody’s website was also affected on Tuesday, displaying a “server error” at the top.

Cloudflare shares were down 4.0 per cent in premarket trading.