Major Cloudflare Outage Disrupts ChatGPT, X and Other Popular Websites

Have you ever tried to use Chat GPT or scroll on X and suddenly it went down? Well that happened yesterday! Cloudflare, a company that powers many of the websites we are used to smoothly getting our information did a global outage. ChatGPT, X, Spotify, Canva, and others are examples of sites that went down. Let’s examine what happened and how significant it was like we are talking over a cup of coffee.

What happened with Cloudflare?​

Cloudflare stated that the "incident" occurred shortly after 6:40 a.m. ET, prompting a global outage. Here’s what happened:

• Shortly after 6:40 a.m. ET, services began to fail.
• A configuration routine change caused a bug in the system that allowed one file to snowball – it became too large and crashed a portion of the system.
• Cloudflare resolved the outage by 14:42 UTC (09:42 a.m. ET). Once resolved, most services commenced service.

I kept hitting refresh on the browser, and nothing loaded. It felt like the internet was doing nothing for several minutes.

Why this mattered​

You may think, "It’s just websites down" - but its much larger than that. Cloudflare powers a huge chunk of the internet, it is not without speed, security, and traffic assistance.

When this happens:

• A slew of websites that use Cloudflare’s CDN, DNS, and security tools stop functioning regularly, none “work” or it simply takes too long to load.
• Many popular services such as ChatGPT, X, Spotify, Canva, etc. were disabled.
• Users get an error message, like “500 internal server error” and “please try again.”

For me, it was strange: it wasn’t just one site, but many sites I visit every day shut down. It shows we rely on these invisible systems.

What Cloudflare said​

Cloudflare assured this had nothing to do with hacking or anything malicious. It stated:

• It has apologized for the outage.
• It resolved the problem, but there will be some residual effects.
• It will do its best to investigate and take action to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

I do like that it is being open about what happened; I feel that is more honest than trying to lie about it.

What can we take away​

This is what the outage revealed to us, one, the value of contingency plans: if your website or app is dependent on only one provider, it's best to have a backup hosting plan.

Second, know your hosting dependencies: if you host your own website, and you're using Cloudflare as DNS or CDN, your website is still dependent on their network. Finally, be aware that unexpected outages can happen: critical systems can fail and it's understandable to have some surprises.

In summary​

When Cloudflare went down for a few minutes, it impacted a large portion of the internet. While they solved the problem very quickly, it was still an excellent case study to illustrate the impact that even a small change to a computer system can have on millions of users. The next time a website doesn't respond, don't assume that your WiFi connection failed.