Cloudflare rules out cyber attack, restores services as outage hit global websites, apps

By Anjali Sharma

NEW YORK – Global web application security and performance company Cloudflare on Tuesday reported issues and outages with its service, impacting popular websites and platforms like X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, and multiplayer games.

Social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter was down globally, including in India. Users in many parts of India were unable to access X’s desktop website and mobile apps, both on Android and iOS, media reported.

The issue was traced to a latent bug that crashed following a routine configuration change. It was resolved within a few hours and normal services were restored for all Cloudflare customers.

Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht explained the glitch, said that “a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made.”

Knecht said that the impact on traffic due to the outage was resolved by 8 pm IST but added, it will require some additional work to fully restore the control plane, which is used by people for configuration.

Cloudflare also dismissed speculation that the outage was caused by a cyber attack. “No evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity”.

The website was opening, the different feeds on the X page were not available.

“Something went wrong. Try reloading.” was the message users were getting while trying to access X.

Media reports said the Cloudflare issue also hit OpenAI, with access to ChatGPT also facing issues. Many users reported seeing the following message while trying to access the ChatGPT website: “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”

In some countries, people were encountering issues with PayPal and Uber as well, specifically Uber Eats.

Canva, a popular graphic design platform, was also reported to be impacted by the Cloudflare outage.

Gemini, Perplexity, Spotify, Downdetector, Truth Social and Canva, as well as gaming platforms like League of Legends and Valorant were also hit.

Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure company that provides services to make websites and applications faster, secure, and reliable, posted the following message on its website at 5.18 pm IST:

“Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly.”