On Tuesday, some users of ChatGPT and social network X experienced access issues as Cloudflare Inc. worked to address a global network outage. According to Bloomberg,
Cloudflare stated it was investigating a problem that could potentially affect many of its clients. The company also pointed out issues with its customer support portal and planned routine maintenance in certain regions.
About an hour after the outage began, Cloudflare announced a partial restoration of services but warned that users might continue to encounter elevated error rates.
Cloudflare's software is utilized by hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide, acting as a buffer between their websites and end-users, protecting their sites from traffic overload attacks.
This is not the first time Cloudflare has faced such issues. In 2019, a software error led to the shutdown of thousands of websites for 30 minutes. Affected services included popular platforms like Medium, Discord, SoundCloud, Coinbase, and Dropbox. In June 2022, the company also experienced an outage that impacted traffic across 19 of its data centers, causing several major websites to go offline.