CloudFlare outage made some major websites unreachable

UPDATE 2:30 P.M. ET:

Cloudflare says it's sorry. The company confirms that a bug in one of its core services caused a major outage on Tuesday, taking large portions of the internet offline and affecting traffic to services including X, ChatGPT, and, ironically, Downdetector.

"We failed our customers and the broader internet," The company’s CTO, Dane Knecht, wrote. "A latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack."

The incident began at approximately 11:48 UTC on November 18, with Cloudflare's official status site acknowledging “internal service degradation”. As the issue spread, users across several regions reported failures to access not only Cloudflare-backed websites but also its Access and WARP services. 

UPDATE 10 A.M. ET: CloudFlare said it is continuing to work on the problems. Elaborating on the issue, a spokesperson said the company experienced a "spike in unusual traffic" to one of its services early Tuesday, morning, resulting in some traffic experiencing errors.

“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson said. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”

• Cloudflare experienced a major outage Tuesday morning due to a “spike in unusual traffic,” causing widespread errors across major platforms including X, ChatGPT, Shopify, Dropbox, and Coinbase.
• The company says it is “all hands on deck,” working to restore normal traffic flow; services are beginning to recover, though higher-than-normal error rates may persist.
• Cloudflare, known for providing security, CDN, DNS, and DDoS protection services, is still investigating the cause of the traffic spike while implementing a fix.

If you have trouble accessing websites Tuesday morning, the problem isn’t with your device or internet service provider.

A CloudFlare outage is affecting X, ChatGPT and other major platforms. According to DownDetector, there were nearly 12,000 reports of problems on X as of 6:45 a.m. ET.

Cloudflare is a tech company providing a variety of internet services, primarily focusing on security and performance for websites and other internet properties. It acts as a security company, a content delivery network (CDN), and a DNS provider.

It also offers services like distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection, web application firewalls (WAF), and tools to speed up websites for users globally.

"We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts," Cloudflare said on its status page early Tuesday. “ The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented." 

According to media reports, other sites affected by the outage include Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, online game League of Legends, Moody’s and NJ Transit. In addition to ChatGPT, the AI platform Perplexity also experienced issues.