Cloudflare, a networking company that provides DDoS protection and web content delivery services to many companies around the world, is recovering from a major outage that brought sites down across the Internet. Users were unable to access X, ChatGPTand even outage tracking site DownDetector on Tuesday morning, with some sites displaying an error message that read: “Unblock Challenges.cloudflare.com to continue.”
The disruption, which began around 6:20 a.m. EST, is related to “a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic,” says Cloudflare spokesperson Jackie Dutton. Edge. “The file exceeded the expected entry size and caused a crash in the software system handling traffic across multiple Cloudflare services.” Dutton added that there was “no evidence” of an attack or other malicious activity.
Cloudflare has released an update to the status page at 9:42 a.m. ET, saying: “A fix has been deployed and we believe the incident has now been resolved. We continue to monitor for bugs to ensure all services are back to normal.”
Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht he wrote in a post on X that the service had “failed” its customers and the wider Internet, adding that “a hidden bug in the service underlying our ability to mitigate bots began to crash after a routine configuration change we made… This was not an attack.”
Other online services including Indeed, Grindr, Uber, Canva, Spotify, NJ Transit, League of Legendsand Archive of Our Own, experienced issues during the downtime, as did digital outlets Axles, InformationAND Policy also dropped.
Update, November 18: Added update from Cloudflare.