Cloudflare Restores Services After Outage Knocks X, ChatGPT, Canva and Downtime Trackers Offline

Cloudflare's global network is currently experiencing issues that has resulted in several websites and services going offline. Several platforms such as X, Elon Musk's microblogging platform, as well as OpenAI's ChatGPT and downtime tracking websites, are currently offline. These websites are displaying an error message that points to an issue at Cloudflare's data centers, instead of the origin hosts. The outage, which began a short while ago, has been acknowledged by the firm, and it is currently taking action to resolve the issues.

Update (9:15pm IST): Cloudflare's system status website says the company has resolved the issue caused widespread HTTP 500 errors (also known as an internal server error) on several platforms, as well as Cloudflare API and dashboard failures. The company says that while several services appear to be recovering, websites might still report "higher-than-normal error rates" while the company resolves the issues affecting its service.

Cloudflare Outage Caused Widespread HTTP 500 Errors

Around 5:15pm IST on Tuesday, Gadgets 360 staff members discovered that several websites, including X, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Canva, and several news websites weren't accessible. Even games like Valorant, League of Legends, and services like Spotify, Uber, Zoom, and Square were also experiencing issues during the outage.

Visitors were shown an HTTP 500 error code, which informed them that Cloudflare's network was impacted by an internal server error. The message also revealed that the origin hosts were online, but Cloudflare's data centers were not accessible. You can tap the image below to see an extensive list of services that were affected during the outage.

Downdetector's list of services impacted by the Cloudflare outage (Tap to expand)
Photo Credit: Screenshot/ Downdetector

At the time of publishing, the error messages on various websites revealed that the outage impacted Cloudflares data centres in various regions, including Chennai, Mumbai, Frankfurt, and New Delhi. The company has already acknowledged the issue and says it is working to understand the full impact and mitigate the problem.tags

It's also worth noting that downtime tracking websites like Downdetector were also inaccessible, as they also rely on Cloudflare's data centres. The Downdetector.in website failed to load as the "challenges.cloudflare.com" domain, which is used to present visitors with a security challenge to prove they're not a bot, was also inaccessible during the outage.

Cloudflare's outage is not the first major incident to affect several websites and platforms this year. In October, a massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage caused by issues at the firm's North Virginia data centre resulted in over 1,000 services remaining inaccessible for up to 12 hours. At the time, the company said the issue was caused by a “Domain Name System (DNS) resolution issue for the regional DynamoDB service endpoints” and apologised for the prolonged outage.