is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
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Cloudflare, a networking company that provides DDoS protection and internet content delivery services for many companies around the globe, is recovering after a major outage that took down sites across the web. Users weren’t able to access X, ChatGPT, and even the outage-tracking site DownDetector on Tuesday morning, with some sites displaying an error message that said, “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”
Cloudflare posted an update to its status page at 9:42AM ET, saying: “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.”
In a statement to The Verge, Cloudflare spokesperson Jackie Dutton says the company noticed a “spike in unusual traffic” to one of its services starting at 6:20AM ET, causing “some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors.” Dutton adds, “We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.” The company is also planning to investigate the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.
Other online services, including Indeed, Grindr, Uber, Canva, Spotify, NJ Transit, League of Legends, and Archive of Our Own, experienced issues during the outage, while digital outlets like Axios, The Information, and Politico also went down.
The Cloudflare outage comes less than a month after a huge Amazon Web Services crash took down Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, and other services, which was followed by issues at Microsoft Azure that brought Xbox offline for hours.