A number of well-known websites, including X and ChatGPT, went down for many on Tuesday due to issues affecting major internet infrastructure company Cloudflare.
Thousands of users began reporting problems with sites, as well as other services, to outage monitoring site Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT.
Cloudflare said the “significant outage” occurred after a configuration file designed to handle dangerous traffic did not work properly and “caused a crash” in its software handling traffic for broader services.
“We apologize to our customers and the internet at large for letting you down today,” the company said in a statement.
“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any disruption is unacceptable,” the company added.
It says that although the issue has been resolved, some services may still experience errors when resuming service.
The outage affected a wide range of applications and websites.
Users have reported delays or technical issues when trying to access services like Grindr, Zoom and Canva.
Meanwhile, social media platform X (formerly Twitter) was displaying a message on its homepage to some users saying there was an issue with its back-end server due to a “bug” originating with Cloudflare.
The ChatGPT site also displayed an error message telling some users: “Please unblock cloudflare.com tasks to continue.”
Cloudflare is a major internet security provider around the world, providing services such as verifying that visitors' connections to sites come from humans rather than bots.
It states that 20% of all websites worldwide use its services in some form.
The range of sites affected was demonstrated by the fact that Downdetector itself – a site many flock to when sites stop loading or have problems – was also displaying an error message when many tried to access it on Tuesday.
Alp Toker, director of NetBlocks, which monitors web service connections, said the outage “indicates a catastrophic disruption to Cloudflare's infrastructure.”
“What's striking is how much of the internet has been forced to hide behind Cloudflare's infrastructure in recent years to avoid denial-of-service attacks,” he told the BBC, highlighting how the company strives to protect sites from malicious attempts to overwhelm them with traffic requests.
He said that, however, as a result of this, and the convenience of its services, it had also become “one of the biggest points of failure on the Internet.”
Cloudflare stressed that the issue was the result of a technical issue.
“To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity,” the company said in a statement.
The company's share price was trading about 3% lower shortly after 1500 GMT.
The issues affecting Cloudflare's services follow an outage of Amazon Web Services last month. more than 1000 sites and applications are disconnected from the network.
Another major web services provider, Microsoft Azure, also suffered soon after.
“The outages we have witnessed over the past few months have further highlighted the dependence on these fragile networks,” said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET.
“Businesses are often forced to rely heavily on companies like Cloudflare, Microsoft and Amazon to host their websites and services because there aren’t many other options.”
