Cloudflare Internet Outage Takes Down ChatGPT, X, More

Update: Cloudflare has confirmed the issue that caused the outage of many popular services across the web and says a “fix is being implemented.” In an update at 8:10 a.m. EST, the brand said it was continuing to work towards restoring other services.

Reports of issues on Downdetector across services like ChatGPT, X, and Cloudflare itself have dropped significantly since the brand’s announcement. However, it may mean you’ll continue to have issues with third-party services for the next few hours.

Cloudflare says, “We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates.”

Original story: Struggling to access websites or apps? It may be because of an outage of Cloudflare services which is impacting third-party tools like ChatGPT and X.

As reported by users on Downdetector, Cloudflare first experienced issues at 6:15 a.m. EST on Tuesday, Nov. 18. The brand acknowledged problems saying, “Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers.”

Many third-party websites have widespread 500 errors. So far, outages are confirmed for social media network X, OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool, and film review website Letterboxd. OpenAI confirmed its issues on its own status website, saying there are also issues with its APIs and its video generation platform Sora.

An update from Cloudflare came at 7:20 a.m. EST where it said it was beginning to see services recover. It noted, “Customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.” The brand has since said it is “continuing to investigate this issue.”

Last month, a major Amazon Web Services outage saw over a 2,000 websites and apps taken offline for hours. The brand later confirmed the issues stemmed from a “latent defect” in the brand’s largest cluster of data centers called US-East-1.

Spotify’s mobile app has also been experiencing issues today with some users finding playing a podcast makes both the Android and iOS apps crash. The issues appear to be unrelated to Cloudflare’s problems as they started earlier in the day.

Disclosure: Downdetector owner Ookla is owned by PCMag parent company Ziff Davis.