A global problem at Cloudflare caused big issues on Tuesday, stopping thousands of users from using sites like X, ChatGPT, Canva, and Grindr. The web service company said the problem started early in the day and began to ease later as systems were fixed.
Cloudflare, which handles about one-fifth of all web traffic, said it first saw problems at about 6:40 a.m. ET. Tech teams put in a fix soon after, but the company said some users could still see issues as the network got back to normal.
According to the outage tracker Downdetector, almost 5,000 reports were sent at the height of the problem before falling to about 600 by 8 a.m. ET, as reported by Reuters.
Spike in Unusual Traffic
Cloudflare said the problem came from a sudden rise in traffic. The company said, “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.”
It added that teams were “all hands on deck” to make sure traffic ran smoothly. The outage hit many apps that use Cloudflare to stay fast and safe. X and OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, did not reply to questions about the global downtime that users faced.Cloudflare said it had fixed some issues but warned that small problems could still happen as traffic moved across regions. The company did not say if the traffic spike came from a cyberattack or a tech fault.
Recent Digital Infrastructure Pressure
The outage came a few weeks after Amazon Web Services had a big failure, which caused many sites like Snapchat and Reddit to go down. Analysts said Tuesday’s outage adds to worries about the safety of key web systems used by millions of people and businesses worldwide.
Cloudflare’s shares fell about 5% in early trading after the problem. Investors were worried about the reliability of one of the world’s largest web networks, which helps sites stay online and handle heavy traffic.
Downdetector said its numbers come from reports by users and might not show all affected users. But the big rise in reports showed a large and fast problem across many countries.
Cloudflare said it is still checking the cause of the unusual traffic. The company said systems are still getting back to normal and full stability will come once all parts are synced and traffic flows smoothly.
