ChatGPT, X among sites blocked in widespread Cloudflare outage

ChatGPT and the social media platform X were among the websites blocking some users’ access on Nov 18 as the web security firm Cloudflare worked to address a widespread, worldwide networking outage.

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 some scheduled maintenance in some areas earlier in the day. At one point, Cloudflare’s own outage status website was not loading.

Cloudflare’s software is used by hundreds of thousands of companies globally, acting as a sort of 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 Cloudflare’s 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, music service SoundCloud, Bitcoin trading platform Coinbase and online storage site Dropbox 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. BLOOMBERG