Cloudflare outage cuts access to X, ChatGPT and other web platforms for thousands

(Reuters) – Major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT, were inaccessible for thousands of users globally on Tuesday as web-infrastructure firm Cloudflare was hit by an outage, disrupting internet services.

Cloudflare, whose network handles around a fifth of web traffic, said it started to investigate the internal service degradation around 6:40 a.m. ET. It has deployed a fix but some customers might still be impacted as it recovers service.

The incident seemingly prevented thousands of users from accessing platforms such as Canva, X, Grindr and ChatGPT as users logged reports with Downdetector. Reports about issues with Cloudflare had, however, come down to about 600 by 8 a.m. 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.

The outage is the latest to hit internet services. Microsoft’s Azure had also faced an issue last month, while disruption at Amazon (AMZN.O),  AWS caused global turmoil among thousands of websites and some of the most popular apps, such as Snapchat (SNAP.N), and Reddit (RDDT.N), earlier in October.