Cloudflare problems: Chief Technology Officer Dane Knecht apologises to internet after global outage took down popular apps including X and ChatGPT

Social media site X, music streaming service Spotify and AI chatbot ChatGPT were among several platforms down for thousands of users on Tuesday. Facebook, AWS (Amazon Web Services), bet365, Canva, BrightHR, and the multiplayer game League of Legends also suffered outages, according to Downdetector.com.

More than 10,000 people reported issues linked to Cloudflare, a web infrastructure company, on Tuesday morning. The issues were first reported around 11am, with several websites, including X, coming back online temporarily before suffering further problems attributed to an "internal server error on Cloudflare's network".

Cloudflare, which provides network and security services for many online businesses in order to help their websites and applications operate, says around a fifth of all global websites use some of its services. The company said in a server update that it was "experiencing an internal service degradation" and that some services may be intermittently affected.

At 1.09pm, Cloudflare said it had identified the issue and was implementing a fix. The outage coincides with Cloudflare's scheduled maintenance at its SCL (Santiago) data centre on Tuesday.

In a rare moment of corporate culpability, Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht has taken full responsibility for the outage. He posted on X: “I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused.

“Transparency about what happened matters, and we plan to share a breakdown with more details in a few hours. In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made.”

He added: “That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack.

“That issue, impact it caused, and time to resolution is unacceptable. Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today. The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most and we are going to do what it takes to earn that back.”

Cloudflare said the "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. It said in a statement: "We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable”.