Several Media Websites Suddenly Down Due to Cloudflare Outrage

A global outage at web-infrastructure firm Cloudflare began to ease on Tuesday after preventing thousands from accessing major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT.

Cloudflare, whose network handles around a fifth of web traffic, said it started to investigate the internal service degradation around 6:40am ET. It has deployed a fix but some customers might still be impacted as it recovers service.

The incident marked the latest hit to major online services. An outage of Amazon's cloud service last month caused global turmoil as thousands of popular websites and apps, including Snapchat and Reddit, were inaccessible due to the disruption.

Cloudflare - whose shares were down about 5% in premarket trading - runs one of the world's largest networks that helps websites and apps load faster and stay online by protecting them from traffic surges and cyberattacks.

Several websites including social media platform X, artificial intelligence giant OpenAI, global outage reporting site Downdetector, Spotify, Canva, and Paypal, were reportedly down or facing trouble loading.

Reports about issues with Cloudflare had, however, come down to about 600 by 8am ET from a peak of nearly 5,000, the outage-tracking tool showed.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources. Since the numbers are based on user-submitted reports, the actual number of affected users may vary.

"We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare's services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare's network to experience errors," the company said in an emailed statement. "We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors."

X and ChatGPT-creator OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is a global web infrastructure company that helps websites and applications run faster and safer. It works as a Content Delivery Network (CDN), storing content on servers worldwide to reduce loading times and protect against cyber threats such as Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. Millions of platforms use Cloudflare to connect users, safeguard assets, and keep services online.

Beyond its CDN and security tools, Cloudflare also provides a fast public DNS resolver called 1.1.1.1 and a developer platform for building and deploying applications. As Bangladesh's digital economy expands from e-commerce to fintech, Cloudflare's services are increasingly relevant to ensuring speed, reliability, and protection online.