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Internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare says it believes it has resolved an issue that caused disruptions to social media platform X, some multiplayer games and ChatGPT, among others.
Cloudflare, a content delivery network that provides networking and security products to Internet service providers, announced on the status page Earlier Tuesday, the company learned of the issue, which affected several customers, and was investigating it.
By 9:42 a.m. ET, it said the fix “has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We continue to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”
This was announced by Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht. post on X that the company had failed its customers and the “internet as a whole” but said the problem was not the result of a cyber attack.
The company said after rolling out the fix that some users may still experience issues using Cloudflare services. Earlier on Tuesday, there were numerous reports of so-called 500 errors, as well as failures in the Cloudflare control panel and API.
According to reports logged on outage tracking site Downdetector, the outage left thousands of users unable to access platforms such as Canva, X, Grindr and ChatGPT.
However, by 8 a.m. ET, reports of problems with Cloudflare had dropped to about 600 from a peak of nearly 5,000.
CBC News has reached out to Cloudflare for a statement. The spokesperson said the company noticed a spike in “unusual traffic” to one of Cloudflare's services this morning and would release an in-depth analysis detailing what happened later.
While fixing the issue, Cloudflare said on its status page that it had to temporarily disable certain services for users in the United Kingdom.
On Tuesday, Cloudflare scheduled maintenance for its data center in Santiago, Chile.
Some cybersecurity experts have been warning for years about the potentially dire consequences of allowing a handful of big tech companies to maintain the infrastructure of the online world.
