Massive Cloudflare outage hits X, ChatGPT and Downdetector; fix in progress
Right now the internet looks a lot shakier than usual. On X, people are posting about missing timelines; a few of us trying to chat with ChatGPT have seen sessions time out, and Downdetector’s own page is flashing red. It all seems to have kicked off early this morning when Cloudflare’s monitors picked up a traffic surge that didn’t fit any of their normal patterns.
Jackie Dutton, the company’s spokesperson, told The Verge the spike hit one of the core services at roughly 6:20 AM ET and it’s been hanging around ever since. Engineers are apparently scrambling to pin down the oddball traffic, but the sheer size of the hit makes a quick fix unlikely. As the outage drags into the late morning, the status page is basically the only official source we have.
That’s why the update at 9:22 AM ET caught my eye - it simply says the team is still working on a solution, without any hint of when things will be back to normal.
On Cloudflare's status page, the most recent update from the company at 9:22AM ET says, "We are continuing to work on a fix for this issue." In a statement to The Verge, Cloudflare spokesperson Jackie Dutton says the company noticed a "spike in unusual traffic" to one of its services starting at 6:20AM ET, causing "some traffic passing through Cloudflare's network to experience errors." Dutton adds, "We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors." The company is also planning to investigate the cause of the unusual spike in traffic. Other online services, including Indeed, Grindr, Uber, Canva, Spotify, NJ Transit, League of Legends, and Archive of Our Own, experienced issues during the outage, while digital outlets like Axios, The Information, and Politico also went down.
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We tend to think the web is rock-solid, but a Cloudflare hiccup this morning proved otherwise. X, ChatGPT and even Downdetector all went dark, leaving most users staring at bland error pages. Some sites simply flashed “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.” According to spokesperson Jackie Dutton, the trouble started after the company saw a sudden spike in odd traffic to one of its services around 6:20 AM.
By 9:22 AM ET the status page said, “We are continuing to work on a fix for this issue,” but gave no ETA. That left a huge number of sites that rely on Cloudflare’s DDoS protection and CDN unreachable - a reminder that a lot of today’s traffic runs through a single vendor. It’s still fuzzy whether the spike was an attack, a mistake or a mis-configuration.
For now we can only wait for the fix; the full fallout will become clearer once things are back up. Some businesses that need real-time data are already reporting delays, and developers are glued to their own dashboards. The episode makes a case for redundancy, yet many firms haven’t set up any alternate routes yet.
The reason behind the traffic surge remains unknown.
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Common Questions Answered
What caused the massive Cloudflare outage that affected X, ChatGPT, and Downdetector?
The outage was triggered by a sudden spike in unusual traffic detected by Cloudflare at around 6:20 AM ET. This traffic surge did not match any normal pattern and caused errors for some traffic passing through Cloudflare's network.
When did Cloudflare first acknowledge the issue on its status page, and what was the latest update?
Cloudflare first posted an update at 9:22 AM ET, stating that engineers were continuing to work on a fix for the issue. The latest message on the status page reiterated that the problem persisted and that a resolution was still in progress.
Who is the spokesperson for Cloudflare, and what did they say about the cause of the traffic spike?
Jackie Dutton is the spokesperson for Cloudflare. She told The Verge that the company noticed a spike in unusual traffic starting at 6:20 AM ET but that the exact cause of the spike remains unknown.
Which services reported specific error messages during the Cloudflare outage?
During the outage, users on X saw missing timelines, ChatGPT sessions timed out, and Downdetector displayed a red alert on its monitoring page. Some pages also displayed a generic message asking users to "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed."