A widespread internet outage struck on Tuesday, affecting prominent websites and social media platforms worldwide, including X (formerly Twitter) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Persecondnews reports that the disruption has been linked to issues with Cloudflare, a leading internet infrastructure provider.
Cloudflare acknowledged the problem, stating, “We are experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service.”
The company has been working to resolve the issue, with updates indicating that services are gradually recovering, though error rates may remain higher than usual.
The outage impacted numerous websites, including major news outlets in Nigeria, such as Vanguard, which experienced intermittent downtime.
Globally, users reported difficulties accessing platforms like Canva, Grindr, Spotify, and League of Legends.
Cloudflare’s infrastructure supports around 20% of global websites, handling security checks and traffic management, making the outage particularly significant.
Cloudflare noted: “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC, causing some traffic passing through our network to experience errors.”
The company is investigating the cause of the disruption and implementing fixes. As of the latest update, Cloudflare stated, “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.”
This incident follows recent outages, including a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) disruption and Microsoft Azure service interruptions, highlighting the internet’s vulnerability to infrastructure issues.
Cloudflare’s role in managing traffic and security for millions of websites underscores the widespread impact of such disruptions.
The outage has sparked concerns about internet resilience and reliance on centralized infrastructure providers.
As Cloudflare continues to restore services, users are left to navigate the intermittent disruptions.
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