Cloudflare Outage Hits X, ChatGPT, Canva: Internet Chaos Worldwide

On Tuesday night, a big technical malfunction happened which affected so many online services that users all over the world could not access them at all or just partly. The list of affected platforms includes X (the rebranded Twitter), ChatGPT, OpenAI, Gemini, Perplexity, Uber, Canva, and many other online services.

The hiccup was linked to an outage at Cloudflare, a prominent American tech company that provides internet security and performance solutions. The bug, which lasted around half a day, made it hard to connect to many websites, but still, some degree of service restoration has been claimed in a lot of areas.

People using the service had difficulty getting to the mentioned services and the access was not steady. Some people even experienced this problem depending on where they were.

Cloudflare runs one of the largest global networks of cloud services, with its servers distributed in 330 cities around the globe. Its offerings aim to give faster, safer, more private, and reliable internet-connected services. By functioning as the middleman between a website's server and its users, the company can control the amount of traffic, stop bad activities, and keep the content near the users by storing it.

Among the facilities that Cloudflare provides for the development of performance and security are X, ChatGPT, OpenAI, Gemini, Perplexity, Canva, and many others.

The Cloudflare company issued a statement in which it acknowledged the enormous outage and said its technical department was busy looking into the matter. The firm stated, "Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing." It went on to say that the restoration of full services to the affected customers is in progress.

Sites Affected by the Outage:

1. X (formerly Twitter)

2. ChatGPT

3. Gemini

4. Co-Pilot

5. League of Legends

6. Spotify

7. Canva

8. Footjet

9. Photocollage

10. Perplexity

11. Grindr

12. Letterboxd

The outage also cut off the access to the Down Detector, a well-known website that monitors the status of other websites, thus it could not inform its users about the full extent of the problem.

The outage caused confusion because most users were not aware of making any setting changes and they found the prompt reading, “Please Unblock Challenges.cloudflare.com to Proceed” when they accessed a website that was affected. This message added to the confusion of the users.

The message is a gatekeeper from Cloudflare, which helps to distinguish between real human users and automated bots. This kind of message usually appears during times of high traffic or security-triggered events, which is the reason why users suddenly encountered verification messages.

Cloudflare has restored partial service, nevertheless, it is still monitoring and stabilizing operations throughout its network.