Global Cloudflare Outage Causing Blackout on major websites

A global outage that began around 11.20am London time today has impacted websites around the world. The ongoing network issue seems to be affecting services and major platforms including X and ChatGPT among others.

Users reported being unable to access websites via Down Detector and feeds are not working on X. While over on ChatGPT, users are unable to access their chat windows in the UK due to Cloudflare’s networking outage preventing its challenge scripts from loading.

This follows the global outage experienced with AWS just weeks ago and reinforces the vulnerability of the internet and how many services are inter-connected with each other.

While Cloudflare serves as a major platform for millions of sites, today’s outage reminds us that there are no quick fixes for globally important infrastructure. When one service is knocked offline, it can impact hundreds or thousands of others.

It is yet unclear what has caused the global outage, but the costs from the ongoing impacts and disruptions could be in the billions of dollars.