A major outage affecting Cloudflare’s Global Network has led to widespread internet disruptions, impacting popular platforms like Elon Musk’s X, ChatGPT,and even Downdetector, the first place people look to understand internet outages.
Cloudflare, the world’s leading web infrastructure and security company, confirmed that it was experiencing a significant issue with its Global Network in the early hours of Tuesday morning, causing widespread outages across the internet. The problem has affected various services, including social media platform X, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and the outage monitoring site Downdetector among many other sites and apps experiencing problems. Even some news sites, including Axios, appear to be completely unreachable as of this writing due to the Cloudflare outage — visitors are asked to “unblock” a Cloudflare address to proceed.
According to Cloudflare’s System Status page, the company is currently investigating the issue, which is causing HTTP 500 errors that impact the Cloudflare dashboard and API. These server-level errors indicate that the problem lies within Cloudflare’s infrastructure, rather than with individual websites or servers. The Company claims in one of its most recent updates that, “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”
As a result of the outage, X has been experiencing intermittent issues, with availability being patchy for the past hour. Downdetector, which ironically relies on Cloudflare’s services, has also been affected by the outage. The site saw a peak of 11,201 reports of issues at 6:37 a.m. ET, with the number of reports gradually decreasing to 6,570 at the last data point. This decrease could suggest that the fix is slowly propagating across the internet, or that fewer people are reporting the issue as it becomes more widely known.
Cloudflare had been undergoing scheduled maintenance at 5:00 a.m. ET, according to the company’s website. This indicates the outage may be as a result of a botched internal change as opposed to a cyberattack or other external issue.
In an effort to mitigate the problem, Cloudflare has disabled WARP access in London. WARP is a tool designed to secure internet connections by encrypting all traffic from a user’s device, primarily used as a privacy tool for consumers and corporate customers. Unlike a VPN, WARP does not hide the user’s IP address; it simply encrypts their traffic.
The outage has also affected the 3D printing community, with popular platforms like Printables and Thangs displaying HTTP 500 error codes when users attempt to access them.
Breitbart News reported in October than a massive Amazon Web Services outage impacted much of the internet:
The root cause of the outage was traced back to an error in a technical update to the API of DynamoDB, a key cloud database service that stores user information and other critical data for numerous online platforms. The update issue affected the Domain Name System (DNS), which helps apps locate the correct server addresses. As a result, apps were unable to find the IP address for DynamoDB’s API and could not establish a connection.
DNS is one of the foundational technologies of the internet. It is often likened to a “phone book” for internet servers, translating addresses we type like amazon.com into IP addresses used to connect us to the proper server. If the DNS is the phone book, then the glitch in AWS’s DynamoDB would be a phone book that lists the wrong number for every person and business — resulting in a ton of failed connections.
Outages from major providers like Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services demonstrate the Internet is not the robust and redundant online service it is touted to be, due to the reliance of a handful of massive companies to keep data flowing.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
