A network issue at web security business Cloudflare has disrupted internet traffic and taken down sites such as Zoom, X, ChatGpt, Upwork, Fiverr and many other websites and Apps for users in several countries.
What is Cloudflare
Cloudflare is an internet infrastructure company that provides services to make websites and applications faster, more secure, and more reliable. It acts as a reverse proxy and a content delivery network (CDN), sitting between users and a website’s origin server to protect against cyberattacks, handle heavy traffic, and speed up content delivery by caching data in data centers around the world. When a site using Cloudflare experiences an issue, visitors may see an error message from Cloudflare itself, explaining that the problem is on its network.
A Cloudflare spokesperson told the media that the company saw “unusual traffic” to one of its services at 6:20 a.m. ET.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson said. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.”
Cloudflare said via its status page that it was experiencing an “internal service degradation” at 6:48 a.m. ET. About 30 minutes later, it said that some services were recovering, but “customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
At 7:37 a.m. ET, the company said it’s “continuing to investigate this issue.”
Downdetector, a site that tracks website outages, was also briefly down early Tuesday morning. It showed that users were also reporting outages at OpenAI and Grindr.