Cloudflare Outage: ChatGPT, X, AWS, and More Down

A Cloudflare outage has affected numerous websites, including ChatGPT, X, AWS, Spotify, Letterboxd, and more, with the first reports of identified issues coming in at around 11:48 AM UTC. The issues reportedly lasted for just over three hours.

Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest content delivery networks, is currently used by approximately 19.4% of all websites on the internet, meaning this issue could have affected millions of websites. At the time of writing, it is not certain how many websites specifically have been affected.

Timeline of Events

All of these events are labelled with UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) times. 

• On November 18, at 11:48, Cloudflare reported “an internal service degradation”. 
• At 12:21, Cloudflare reported that it was “seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts”.
• At 13:04, Cloudflare disabled WARP access in London. WARP refers to Cloudflare’s VPN service and connects users to the internet using Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS, which is known for its speed and security.
• At 13:09, Cloudflare reported that it had identified the issue and that a fix was being implemented.
• At 13:13, Cloudflare reported that it had “made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover.” Error levels for Access and WARP users had allegedly returned to “pre-incident rates.”
• At 13:35, Cloudflare said it was “working on restoring service for application services customers.”
• At 13:46, Cloudflare released an official statement, as reported by TechRadar, saying: “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. We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic.” 
• At 14:34, Cloudflare reported that it had “deployed a change which has restored dashboard services” and that it was “still working to remediate broad application services impact.”
• At 14:42, Cloudflare finally announced that a fix had been implemented. “We believe the incident is now resolved,” the company wrote on its status page. “We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”
• At 14:57, Cloudflare clarified that some customers “may still be experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard” and that it was working on a fix and monitoring any future issues.
• At 15:40, Cloudflare released an update stating its team was continuing to focus on restoring service post-fix”, including mitigating issues that remained post-deployment.
• At 16:27, errors and latency issues reportedly continued to improve, but some issues still remained.

What Is Causing the Outage?

According to Cloudflare, the cause of the outage has been identified but not revealed.

Users to affected sites have been receiving onscreen messages such as “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed” or internal server error messages.

As aforementioned, the number of websites impacted has not yet been determined, but even Downdetector – the site used by many to track other website outages – had previously been affected.

Summary 

A global issue with Cloudflare has been affecting a number of online services, but the main issue seems to have been resolved.

This is a live post and will be updated. 

Have you been affected by the outage? Email tips@salesforceben.com