Cloudflare Outage Disrupts ChatGPT, X, Other Internet Services
A widely used Internet infrastructure company said early Tuesday that it had largely resolved an issue that caused outages that affected users of everything from ChatGPT and the online game “League of Legends” to the New Jersey Transit system.
Cloudflare said at 10:40 a.m. that its engineers were still working on mitigating some ongoing issues after releasing a fix for the outage, but were continuing to monitor for other issues.
Other platforms that experienced outages on Tuesday included social media site X, Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase and Moody’s credit rating service. Error Code 500 was displayed on Moody’s website and individuals were instructed to visit the Cloudflare website for more information.
New Jersey Transit said parts of its digital services, including njtransit.com, may be temporarily unavailable or may load slowly. And New York City Emergency Management said there were reports of city services being affected by the outage. The municipality continues its inspections against disruptions.
In France, the website of the national railway company SNCF was affected. The company warned customers that “some information and programs may not be available or current.” “Our teams are working to restore these services as quickly as possible.”
Cloudflare, headquartered in San Francisco, is working behind the scenes to make the internet faster and more secure, but when problems arise it “results in a massive digital lockout” for internet users, said cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple.
While many people think there is a direct line between their digital device and the website, what actually happens is that companies like Cloudflare sit in the middle of those connections, he said.
Cloudflare is a “content delivery network” that takes content from 20% of the world’s websites and mirrors it to thousands of servers around the world, said Chapple, an information technology professor at the University of Notre Dame Mendoza School of Business.
“When you access a website protected by Cloudflare, your computer does not connect directly to that site,” Chapple said. “Instead, it connects to the closest Cloudflare server, which may be very close to your home. This protects the website from traffic congestion and gives you a faster response. It’s a win-win for everyone until it fails and 20% of the internet goes out at the same time.”
Last month Microsoft It had to deploy a fix to address an outage in Azure cloud portals that left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft, and other services. The tech company wrote: Azure status page It was stated that the outage was caused by a configuration change made in the Azure infrastructure.
And Amazon suffered a major outage cloud computing service In October. The company fixed the problem, but the outage disabled a wide range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms.
Associated Press writers Kelvin Chan in London and Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.
