Cloudflare Outage Hits Internet: X, Perplexity, ChatGPT Among Various Websites Affected

An outage affecting Cloudflare, the provider of content delivery network (CDN) services, led to the temporary suspension in services of various major websites, including X, ChatGPT and Perplexity, on Tuesday.

X was down briefly for scores of users across India and various parts of the world, with netizens unable to access the microblogging platform's website and application feed.

DownDetector, the platform tracking outages in real-time, was itself down for a few minutes due to the glitch. However, after it resumed, a sharp spike in outage reports got reflected.

The complaints of X's inaccessibility spiked at around 5:10 pm (IST). Around 47% of the outage complaints were related to feed, 30% said the website was down, and 23% faced server connection issues. At about 5:40 pm, however, X turned accessible for most users in India.

Users visiting the websites of ChatGPT and Perplexity read a message stating: "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed." Among other platforms, the websites of Shopify and news agency ANI were also inaccessible for users.

Cloudflare, on its website, said it has identified the glitch and is working towards resolving the issue. "The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented," it said.

"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. We have re-enabled WARP access in London. We are continuing working on restoring service for application services customers," it added in a subsequent update.

Cloudflare, in a statement issued at 14:42 hours UTC (8:13 pm IST), said the issue has been resolved.

"A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal," it said.

"Some customers may be still experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard. We are working on a fix to resolve this, and continuing to monitor for any further issues," the statement added.

The episode echoes the technical flight affecting Amazon Web Services, one of the biggest cloud services provider, last month. The glitch had led to several apps, websites, and search engines facing an outage. Some of the major entities hit were YouTube, Snapchat and Google.