Cloudflare Outage Knocks ChatGPT and X Offline Globally

Cloudflare went down this morning.

Starting around 6:20 a.m. Eastern, a bunch of big sites just stopped loading for people all over the world. ChatGPT was blank for a lot of users. X (the site formerly called Twitter) was throwing errors. Even Downdetector, the place everyone runs to check if something’s broken, was unreachable for some.

Cloudflare put out a short statement: they saw a weird spike in traffic hitting one of their services, and that caused errors for anything routing through them. They said they don’t know yet what caused the spike and that everybody on the team is working on it.

They kept posting little updates on their status page while they dug in.

Cloudflare sits in front of a huge chunk of the internet. It speeds things up, blocks attacks, and basically acts like a giant shield. When it coughs, a lot of sites feel it.

Stock was already down more than 5% before the market opened.

This is the third big one in a month. AWS had a day-long mess a few weeks ago, then Microsoft’s Azure and 365 services went dark globally right after. Now Cloudflare.

That’s where things stand. They’re still working on it. Not much else to say until they figure out what actually happened.