This article covers a developing story. Continue to check back with us as we will be adding more information as it becomes available.
It is November 18th, and after reloading ChatGPT and X (formerly Twitter) a dozen times, I’ve reached the conclusion that something must be wrong with my router, as these websites keep returning a Cloudflare error. On most, it says, “Please unblock challenge.cloudflare.com to continue.”
It didn’t take long after I started Googling for a solution to realize it’s not just me. There’s a Cloudflare outage, and it’s taking the internet down with it.
Another outage, from a different provider
It hasn’t been long since the Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage. That incident took down a good portion of the internet. If a website worked during the AWS outage, it was because it wasn’t hosted on AWS. Likely, it was on Cloudflare. Now, it seems, it’s Cloudflare’s turn, and every website that relies on its services is down.
This list includes (but is definitely not limited to) ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), Canva, Letterboxd, and Perplexity. All are services with millions of daily users. If you open any of these websites, you’ll see an error: either an “Internal server error” suggesting that you’re okay and the host is okay, but the Cloudflare server is down, or the simpler “Please unblock challenge.cloudflare.com to continue” error.
What exactly does Cloudflare do?
Cloudflare is a Content Delivery Network (CDN). It functions as a connectivity cloud that makes websites and applications faster and more secure by routing internet traffic through its global network. Cloudflare caches the content and hosts it on its servers. When a user attempts to access a service, they are served the “content” through the Cloudflare server closest to them. In a way, Cloudflare doesn’t host the service or website itself, but rather it hosts copies and parts of it to serve them faster.
Despite the original asset not being hosted directly on Cloudflare, an outage like this will make the asset inaccessible. That’s precisely what’s happening right now.
When will the Cloudflare outage be fixed?
Cloudflare has acknowledged the issue. The Cloudflare System Status page shows that they acknowledged the issue at 11:48 UTC (or 06:48 EST) and have been working to resolve it. The latest status update from Cloudflare is at 13:58 UTC (08:58 EST), stating that “We are continuing working on restoring service for application services customers.”
Despite this ongoing work, many services, including a behemoth like ChatGPT, remain inaccessible.