Ah, the inevitabilities of life: death, taxes, and eating crow on the internet.
The infrastructure service Cloudflare faced massive outages on Tuesday morning, cutting off access to a number of popular platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify, and others. The outage also impacted Elon Musk’s X, just one month after the CEO gloated at a widespread AWS outage, which included the encrypted messaging service Signal.
“Messages on X chat are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange ‘AWS dependencies,’ so I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head,” Musk wrote on X. We cannot link his post directly, since X is down.
Signal President Meredith Whittaker took the outage as an opportunity to explain the detriment of so much of the internet being run on just a few infrastructure services, like CloudFlare and AWS.
“The question isn’t ‘why does Signal use AWS?’” she wrote on Bluesky. “It’s to look at the infrastructural requirements of any global, real-time, mass comms platform and ask how it is that we got to a place where there’s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers.”
Cloudflare wrote on its status page that the issue had been identified, and a fix was being implemented. As of publication, service has not been restored to all Cloudflare customers yet, but users may notice some platforms starting to come back online.
This story is developing…