A worldwide problem with Cloudflare, a big name in web infrastructure, seems to be getting better after a slowdown that stopped thousands of people from using popular online services like X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT (run by OpenAI). The latest tech problem to affect people around the world is Cloudflare. It happened just one month after a major slowdown at Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused similar problems on the internet.
What caused Cloudflare to go down?
Cloudflare's network routes and protects about 15% of the world's web traffic. The company stated that it started looking into an "internal service degradation" on Tuesday at 6:40 am ET (11:40 UTC).
The company said that the problem was caused by a lot of "unusual traffic" to one of its services, which caused some data going through its very large network to go wrong. Since then, a fix has been put in place, but some customers may still be affected until the service is fully restored. The first reports of problems with Cloudflare peaked at almost 5,000 on the failure tracking site Down Detector. By 8:00am ET, that number had dropped quickly to around 600 reports.
Major platforms that were affected by the problem
Because of the Cloudflare problem, thousands of people around the world were briefly unable to use or had serious loading issues with popular online services like:
- X (social media)
- Open Ai's ChatGPT (AI)
- Spotify (music streaming)
- Canva (design platform)
- PayPal (payments)
What does Cloudflare do?
Cloudflare is an important, fast Content Delivery Network (CDN) and an important part of the internet's protection. It runs one of the biggest networks in the world, which helps websites load faster and protects them from big cyber risks like Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. Cloudflare is used by millions of platforms to keep their services and valuables safe.
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