Cloudflare apologises for outage which took down X and ChatGPT
21 minutes ago Share Save Liv McMahon Technology reporter Share Save
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A number of high-profile websites, including X and ChatGPT, went down for many on Tuesday, due to problems affecting major internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare. Thousands of users began reporting issues with the sites, as well as other services, to outage monitoring site Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT. Cloudflare said th "significant outage" occurred after a configuration file designed to handle threat traffic did not work as intended and "triggered a crash" in its software handling traffic for its wider services. "We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today," it said in a statement.
"Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable," the company added. It said while the issue had been resolved, some services might still encounter errors as they came back online. A wide range of apps and websites were impacted by the outage. Users reported encountering delays or technical issues when trying to access services such as Grindr, Zoom and Canva. Meanwhile social media platform X (formerly Twitter) was displaying a message on its homepage for some users which said there was a problem with its internal server due to an "error" originating with Cloudflare. ChatGPT's site was also displaying an error message telling some users: "please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed."
OpenAI The error message which greeted ChatGPT users
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