ExclusiveCloudflare Outage Easing After Impacting Thousands of Internet Users

A global outage at web infrastructure firm Cloudflare began to ease on Tuesday after preventing thousands from accessing major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT. The outage prevented thousands of users from accessing platforms such as Canva, X, Grindr and ChatGPT, prompting users to log outage reports with DownDetector. Cloudflare, whose network handles around a fifth of web traffic, said it started to investigate the internal service degradation around 6.40am ET. It has deployed a fix, but some customers might still be impacted as it recovers service. 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. Reports about issues with Cloudflare had, however, down to about 600 by 8am ET from a peak of nearly 5,000, the outage tracking tool showed. The incident marked the latest hit to major online services. An outage of Amazon's cloud service last month caused global turmoil as thousands of popular websites and apps, including Snapchat and Reddit, were inaccessible due to the disruption.