TLDR
- Cloudflare experienced an outage on Tuesday that knocked multiple major websites offline for several hours including ChatGPT, X, Shopify, and Truth Social
- The issue was caused by an automatically generated configuration file that grew too large and crashed Cloudflare’s traffic management system
- Cloudflare confirmed no evidence of cyberattack or malicious activity and implemented a fix by 9:57 a.m. ET
- The company apologized for the disruption, which affected roughly 20% of the web given Cloudflare’s extensive reach
- This follows recent outages from Amazon Web Services in October and Microsoft Azure services, plus the major CrowdStrike incident in July 2024
Cloudflare suffered a major outage on Tuesday morning that disrupted access to numerous popular websites and online services for users around the world. The internet infrastructure company identified and resolved the problem within several hours.
The outage began around 5:20 a.m. ET when Cloudflare detected unusual traffic patterns. Services started returning to normal after the company implemented a fix around 9:57 a.m. ET.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT was among the services affected by the disruption. The company’s Sora video app also experienced problems during the outage.
Elon Musk’s social media platform X went offline for many users. E-commerce platform Shopify and job search site Indeed also faced accessibility issues.
Other impacted services included Anthropic’s Claude chatbot and President Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform. Even Downdetector, the website that tracks service outages, became temporarily inaccessible for some users.
NJ Transit’s digital services were disrupted as well. OpenAI’s status page later confirmed that ChatGPT and Sora had fully recovered after experiencing issues with a third-party service provider.
What Caused the Outage
A Cloudflare spokesperson explained the technical cause of the disruption. An automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic grew larger than expected.
The oversized file triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for multiple Cloudflare services. The company emphasized there was no evidence of a cyberattack or malicious activity.
Cloudflare apologized to customers and internet users for the service interruption. The spokesperson called any outage “unacceptable” given the importance of the company’s services.
Cloudflare’s Role in Internet Infrastructure
Cloudflare provides critical services to businesses worldwide. The company manages and secures traffic for approximately 20% of websites on the internet.
One key service Cloudflare offers is protection against distributed denial of service attacks. These attacks occur when malicious actors flood a website with traffic requests to overwhelm its systems.
The company’s stock price dropped more than 4% following news of the outage. Cloudflare noted that some users might still experience issues accessing its online dashboard even after the fix was implemented.
The company said it would continue monitoring for errors to ensure all services return to normal operations. By mid-morning Tuesday, most affected websites had resumed normal function.
This outage marks the latest in a series of disruptions to major internet services. Amazon Web Services experienced a daylong outage in October that affected numerous online platforms.
Microsoft’s Azure cloud and 365 services also suffered a global outage recently. In July 2024, cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused widespread problems when a faulty software update temporarily grounded flights and impacted financial services and hospitals.
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