A massive Cloudflare outage took down X, ChatGPT, and even Downdetector

Cloudflare, a networking company that provides DDoS protection and Internet content delivery services to many companies around the world, is recovering after a major outage that took down sites across the web. Users could not access X, ChatGPTAnd even outage tracking site DownDetector on Tuesday morning, with some sites displaying an error message saying: “Please unblock Challenges.cloudflare.com to continue.”

The flaw, which began around 6:20 a.m. ET, is related to an “automatically generated configuration file to manage threat traffic,” said Jackie Dutton, a spokesperson for Cloudflare. Edge. “The file size exceeded the expected size of entries and crashed the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare services.” Dutton added that there was “no evidence” of an attack or other malicious activity.

Cloudflare has published an update To its status page at 9:42 a.m. ET, saying: “The fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We continue to monitor errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”

Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht he wrote in a post on X That the service had “failed” its customers and the broader internet, adding that “an inherent flaw in the service that supports our ability to mitigate botnets began to crash after a routine configuration change we made… This was not an attack.”

Other online services, including Indeed, Grindr, Uber, Canva, Spotify, and NJ Transit, league of legendsand Archive of Our Own had outage issues, while I preferred the digital outlets Axios, Informationand Politico It also decreased.

Update November 18: Added an update from Cloudflare.