Topline
Several major websites, including X and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, slowly began to come online again on Tuesday after web traffic management giant Cloudflare reported a disruption in its services worldwide.
An outage in Cloudflare’s services knocked X, ChatGPT and other websites offline on Tuesday morning.
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Key Facts
Cloudflare implemented a “fix” and believes the “incident is now resolved,” according to the company’s live status page, but also noted it would continue monitoring for errors.
However, the company also said some customers were still reporting issues “logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard,” and said it was still working to resolve the ongoing issue.
Cloudflare previously said it is “experiencing an internal service degradation,” which could cause some of its services to be “intermittently impacted.”
In a following update, Cloudflare said it was seeing services recover, but “customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts,” later adding that the “issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”
Crowdsourced data on Downdetector.com showed that the streamer Spotify, graphic design platform Canva and popular fan fiction website “Archive of Our Own” were also impacted by the outage.
Several major websites use Cloudflare to manage internet traffic and prevent targeted cyberattacks.
What Caused The Cloudflare Outage?
One of Cloudflare’s services “saw a spike in unusual traffic” around 6:20 a.m. EST on Tuesday, which caused further traffic to some sites to experience errors, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Forbes in a statement. The issue appears to stem from an automatically-generated configuration file that “grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services,” Prince said. The CEO said there was no evidence the outage was caused by an attack. The company expects service will still be “briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post incident but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours.”
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/11/18/cloudflare-outage-knocks-x-and-chatgpt-offline/