Cloudflare, a networking company that provides DDoS protection and internet content delivery services for many companies around the globe, is working to fix a major outage that’s taking down sites across the web. Users encountered error messages when trying to access X, ChatGPT, and even the outage-tracking site DownDetector, which are now showing signs of recovery. Many sites displayed an error message saying “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.” On Cloudflare’s status page, the most recent update from the company at 9:34AM ET says:
We’ve deployed a change which has restored dashboard services. We are still working to remediate broad application services impact.
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. The Cloudflare outage comes less than a month after a huge Amazon Web Services crash took down Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, and other services, which was followed by issues at Microsoft Azure that brought Xbox offline for hours.
Source: Emml. Quaicoe
