A massive internet outage originating from the web infrastructure giant Cloudflare hit parts of the globe today, rendering access into several major online platforms into non-existence. Services ranging from AI powerhouse Chatbot AI to social network X (used to be Twitter) and many other Cloudflare-dependent websites went on downtime.
This widespread failure was so alert that even Downdetector noticed difficulties in reporting it, which goes to reveal the seriousness of the system-wide breakdown. Coming into view so soon after the last month’s big-time AWS outage, it’s also yet another sobering lesson in how fault-prone modern webservices are.
Timeline and Impact
Around 5:20 p.m. local time, initial reports started surfacing.
Multiple monitoring services had picked up that Cloudflare, which provides crucial CDN and DDoS mitigation services to millions of websites, was experiencing system-wide issues.
The message was causing the modes of widespread 500 errors across the affected platforms.
Acknowledged and under investigation.
Cloudflare’s status dashboard accepted the issue instantaneously, giving customers and programmers alike assurance that mitigation was in progress.
“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue that impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard, and API also failing. We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly.”
Some services have begun recovery according to their most recent update:
X (Twitter) and some other online platforms are up again throughout many regions.
The company confirmed that it has identified the core issue and applied a fix to its software.
Cloudflare has also said that Cloudflare Access and WARP services have been successfully restored and that the error levels were returning to their pre-incident levels.
While outages are still rife across many locations, Cloudflare has been working to restore all systems to full power.
“We continue to work to restore service to application services customers,” Cloudflare’s most recent post reads.
This is a developing story. Check back for more updates.
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