Cloudflare Outage Impacts Thousands As Ripple Effect Hits X, Spotify, And ChatGPT

A Cloudflare outage early Tuesday sparked a ripple effect that took down multiple platforms, from social media platform X and music streaming service Spotify to the artificial intelligence assistant ChatGPT, impacting thousands of users.

Cloudflare is an American company that provides internet infrastructure and acts as a “gateway” — providing security for multiple websites and acting as a content delivery network (CDN) to make sure things run more smoothly and efficiently — so when Cloudflare went down, multiple websites and applications felt the impact.

The outages were first reported, according to tracking website DownDetector, just after 6 a.m. ET as users reported error messages across X and other platforms.

Reports of X outages peaked at over 10,000 users affected. OpenAI saw fewer reports — just over 1,800 — but those reports peaked in the same timeframe. A number of other applications and websites — from Shopify, Google, and Amazon to DoorDash, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom — also saw reports of outages and error messages that peaked during the same time.

Cloudflare posted an update a short time later:

Our support portal is currently experiencing issues, and as such customers might encounter errors viewing or responding to support cases. Responses on customer inquiries are not affected, and customers can still reach us via live chat (Business and Enterprise) through the Cloudflare Dashboard, or via the emergency telephone line (Enterprise). We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem.

After several hours and numerous updates stating that they were still working on the problem, a follow-up message stated, “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”

They warned that some users might still experience lagging outages or error messages, and assured that they were monitoring for further issues.