What is Cloudflare as massive internet outage impacts X and ChatGPT

Just a few weeks after the AWS internet outage that took down half the internet, another massive incident has led to a number of websites going down.

This includes X, OpenAI (causing ChatGPT to also go down), bet365, Archive of Our Own, Canva, IKEA, Google Gemini, and League of Legends.

A number of the websites have been intermittently going down and back up, leading people to flock on to social media to try and figure out what’s going on.

Quickly it became obvious that the issue lies with technology giant Cloudflare, however your average person has no idea what this company does, much less that it underpins some of the most popular websites on the internet.

What is Cloudflare and why has it caused so many websites to go down?

It's a bad day for the staff at Cloudflare (Getty Stock Images)

Cloudflare is a technology company used by some of the biggest websites in the world.

They provide security to websites and apps, also ensuring the performance of the sites.

Cloudflare acts as a reverse proxy, which essentially makes it the public face of the website.

By providing a layer of protection between the actual website’s servers and the people making requests of those servers, it gives protection from DDoS attacks and bots.

This, in theory, ensures the smooth running and performance of websites, but of course leads to catastrophe if the public face goes down.

Since this is so essential to how the websites which use it operate, Cloudflare going down will lead to numerous issues until it is fixed.

What has Cloudflare said about the outage and have there been any updates?

Cloudflare going down has had a big knock on effect (Downdetector)

At the time of writing Cloudflare has been simply stating that they are working on solving the outage as soon as they can.

The company has provided a partial reasoning for why the outage has happened, saying in a statement that it is due to a ‘spike in unusual traffic’.

The spokesperson said: “We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic.

“We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”

Whilst DownDetector (which itself has been going down intermittently throughout today) states that there has been a reduction in reported outages since its peak earlier this afternoon, there are still well over 900 reports stating that Cloudflare is out.

In DownDetector's comment sections, there are some reporting the return of services in the UK, but Cloudflare has not yet issued a confirmation that the issue is resolved worldwide.