Some websites, including the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), have been hit by issues affecting the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare. Thousands of users reported problems with X and other services to the outage monitoring site Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT on Tuesday, November 18.
Cloudflare stated in a note on its service status dashboard at 11:48 UTC: “Cloudflare is aware of and investigating an issue that potentially impacts multiple customers. Further details will be provided as more information becomes available.” In an update, the company mentioned they were “seeing services recover,” but customers “may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.” This indicates that some platforms may continue to experience disruptions while the company works to resolve the technical problems.
Cloudflare is a major global provider of internet security and services, handling tasks like verifying whether website visitors are humans or bots. The company claims that 20% of all websites worldwide use its services in some capacity. It remains unclear which and how many of these websites have been affected by the outage, as well as the extent of the impact.
Some users have reported that the issues are affecting other high-profile platforms, including OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT. OpenAI stated that they are investigating these issues but have not confirmed whether they are directly related to Cloudflare.
These Cloudflare service disruptions follow a recent outage involving Amazon Web Services (AWS) last month, which caused over 1,000 websites and apps to go offline. Shortly afterward, another major web services provider, Microsoft Azure, also experienced outages. Experts suggest that incidents like these highlight the fragility of modern internet infrastructure and the significant challenges they can create for smaller companies relying on these services.
