A significant outage at Cloudflare on Tuesday disrupted several leading websites and big online platforms around the world, leaving millions of users unable to access services.
Outage-tracking site DownDetector — which typically reports such disruptions — was also affected.
Visitors to websites such as X, formerly known as Twitter, ChatGPT and film reviewing site Letterboxd saw an error message that indicated that Cloudflare problems meant that the page could not show.
Cloudflare, a key internet infrastructure provider, helps websites stay online during high traffic and shields them from cyberattacks.
In a status update, the company confirmed it was experiencing “widespread 500 errors” and that its dashboard and API were failing.
“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating, an issue which impacts multiple customers… We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly,” the company said.
A 500 error indicates that a server has encountered an unexpected condition preventing it from completing a request, but cannot specify the exact cause.
Affected users saw a message indicating there was an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network”. It asked users to “please try again in a few minutes.”
As part of its remediation efforts, Cloudflare temporarily disabled some services for users in the United Kingdom.
“We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover… We have re-enabled WARP access in London. We are continuing to work toward restoring other services,” the company added.
Cloudflare noted that services were gradually recovering but warned that customers “may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates” as full restoration continues.
(Photo: Thisage)