Cloudflare says global outage resolved after disrupting access to major platforms

The global outage at web-infrastructure firm Cloudflare was resolved on Tuesday after it briefly prevented thousands of users from accessing major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT.

In an update, the company said it had implemented a fix and restored 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,” Cloudflare said in a statement.

Earlier, Cloudflare, whose network handles around a fifth of global web traffic, said it began investigating the internal service degradation at around 6:40 a.m. ET. It has deployed a fix, but some customers may still be impacted as services recover.

The incident marked the latest hit to major online services. An outage of Amazon's cloud service last month caused global turmoil as thousands of popular websites and apps, including Snapchat and Reddit were inaccessible due to the disruption.

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Cloudflare, whose shares were down about 5% in premarket trading - runs one of the world's largest networks that helps websites and apps load faster and stay online by protecting them from traffic surges and cyberattacks.

The latest outage prevented thousands of users from accessing platforms such as Canva, X, Grindr and ChatGPT, prompting users to log outage reports with Downdetector.

Reports about issues with Cloudflare had, however, come down to about 600 by 8 am. ET from a peak of nearly 5,000, the outage-tracking tool showed.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources. Since the numbers are based on user-submitted reports, the actual number of affected users may vary.

"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."

X and ChatGPT-creator OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.