Cloudflare is down this morning, causing outages at X, OpenAI, and even some online games as sporadic disruptions continue

Another multi-platform outage strikes, as Cloudflare suffers issues and triggers downtime on popular websites like X (formerly Twitter), as confirmed by the official Cloudflare Status page. The root of the cause hasn't been revealed, though "scheduled maintenance in SCL (Santiago) datacenter" was planned for this time of day.

The latest from Cloudflare is more on the technical side regarding its web traffic encryption technology, as it "disabled WARP access in London." Naturally, users in the United States shouldn't be affected, but the overall red alert status remains.

With a brutal touch of irony, even downdetector, a popular downtime tracker, was initially taken offline due to its reliance on Cloudflare's services. However, it seemed to have recovered within only a few minutes. Others weren't so lucky, showing "Internal server error" messages with a generic "error code 500" accompaniment.

Move over AWS, it's Cloudflare's turn

This downtime all started around 6:00 AM ET, when Cloudflare's support portal provider started "experiencing issues", and saw the degradation of Elon Musk's social platform X, alongside popular video games like League of Legends, reporting issues via downdetector (when it had recovered).

By 7:03 AM ET, Cloudflare confirmed that its teams were "continuing to investigate this issue", while even its status page showed signs of breaking down, losing its CSS styling. More communications came at 7:21 AM ET, claiming that Cloudflare was "seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts." Ditto for around ten minutes later, and throughout the hour, as its internal investigations kept rolling and X sporadically failed to load.

If you were (or still are) struggling to load posts on X, you'd likely see "Something went wrong. Try reloading" messages, just as anyone trying to create work on Canva suffers similar blocks. Even if you're trying to play a few games of LoL or Valorant, this is likely why you couldn't connect to any servers.

Generic messages like "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed" appear on several websites, including OpenAI, though access to ChatGPT seemed to recover first, with the corporate website following after.

If you still see this message while browsing the web this morning, don't fret; you haven't actually done anything wrong. Rather, the security systems Cloudflare provides aren't working, though the websites they're supposed to protect remain live in the background.

Our own team is experiencing issues with PayPal and Uber (specifically, Uber Eats), though it doesn't appear to be as widespread as other platforms. The apps and websites themselves load, but payments and orders are intermittently affected.

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