Key Takeaways
- Major Cloudflare outage disrupted services like X and ChatGPT globally.
- The issue began around 6:40 AM ET (6:40 PM Thailand time) and lasted about an hour.
- Cloudflare deployed a fix, but some residual impact continued during recovery.
A widespread Cloudflare outage on Tuesday evening caused significant disruptions to major internet platforms including X and ChatGPT, with services beginning to recover after approximately one hour. The web infrastructure company, which handles roughly 20% of global web traffic, confirmed the service degradation started around 6:40 AM Eastern Time.
Service Impact and User Experience
Users in Thailand and other regions reported being unable to access X and numerous other local and international sites for about an hour. Cloudflare acknowledged that some customers might still experience issues as service recovery continued.
“We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11.20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors,” the company said in an emailed statement. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
Cloudflare’s Critical Role and Past Incidents
Cloudflare serves as a critical buffer and security layer for hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide, protecting websites from traffic-based attacks. This is not the first time its system has failed.
In July 2019, a software bug caused a major 30-minute outage. More recently, in June 2022, a impacted 19 data centers, taking down several major websites for about 90 minutes.
A Pattern of Major Service Disruptions
This incident is the latest in a series of hits to major online services. It follows last month’s that caused global turmoil, rendering popular platforms like Snapchat and Reddit inaccessible.
