Large parts of the web have been down for thousands of people today due to a problem with Cloudflare.
Major websites such as X and ChatGPT, uber and spotify temporarily stopped working due to an outage at Internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare on Tuesday.
Issues with other popular platforms including PayPal, Letterboxd and bet365, began at around 11.20am.
Cloudflare blamed the outage on a surge in “unusual traffic.”
“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,” according to a company spokesman, CBS news reported.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic.”
Downdetector.co, the popular tool for checking whether a site is down, downdetector.com, was also affected.
Metro reported: Cloudflare said on its status webpage that the issue has been fixed, adding: ‘We believe the incident is now resolved.
‘We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.’
Cloudflare engineers briefly switched off WARP – akin to a VPN, which connects you to the internet in a secure and fast way via Cloudflare.
‘We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates,’ Cloudflare said at 1.13pm.
‘We have re-enabled WARP access in London. We are continuing to work towards restoring other services.’
OpenAI, the start-up behind ChatGPT, confirmed that the chatbot is down for some users and is investigating.
When loading up the chatbot, the screen reads: ‘Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.’
While trying to access bet365, it shows visitors an error message: ‘Sorry, you have been blocked. You are unable to access bet365.com.’
While both the chatbot and the betting platform tell users they have been ‘blocked’, this isn’t the case – it’s just Cloudflare not working.
Is the outage a privacy risk at all?
Rob Jardin, Chief Digital Officer at NymVPN, warned to Metro that the answer might be yes.
‘As Cloudflare is the intermediary between millions of users and the web, including through many VPN and crypto services, this can reveal the real IP addresses of people, creating opportunities for specific cyber attacks like a denial of service attack (DDoS),’ he said.
”Imagine you’re texting a friend, and suddenly the person managing the phone network can see who you are and what you’re doing. That’s essentially what happens.
‘Your real physical location (IP address) and the list of every website you try to visit (DNS queries) can be briefly exposed to anyone watching, including hackers or surveillance systems.’
Jardin added that today’s disruption is similar to the outage that shook Amazon Web Services, a giant cloud computing service.