What caused the Cloudflare outage? Company blames ‘unusual’ spike in traffic before apps including X and Bet365 went down
Cloudflare was hit by an outage that has knocked several major websites and services offline for global users.
Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare was hit by an outage on Tuesday. It has caused several popular apps to go down including X, Bet365, Canva, Vinted and more.
OpenAI’s status page also indicated its ChatGPT and Sora short-form video app were having issues due to “an issue with one of our third-party service providers.” A Cloudflare spokesperson said the company observed a “spike in unusual traffic” to one of its services around 6:20 a.m. ET, causing some traffic passing through its network to experience errors.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson added. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
Cloudflare has not confirmed when services will be back to normal. It also has not confirmed the root cause.
The company said it was “continuing to work on restoring service” for customers in an update posted to its status page. Cloudflare’s software is used by many businesses worldwide, helping to manage and secure traffic for a 20% of the web. Among the services it provides are that it guards against distributed denial of service attacks, which are when malicious actors attempt to overload a website’s system with so many traffic requests that it can’t function.
The issue comes less than a month after Amazon Web Services suffered a daylong disruption that took down numerous online services, followed by a global outage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud and 365 services.