If you’re having trouble accessing sites and services on the internet this morning, it isn’t just you: It appears Cloudflare is experiencing a global outage.
When I tried to load sites like X, ChatGPT, or, ironically, Downdetector, I was met with various errors. X showed me an internal service error, while Downdetector asked me to “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.” (I definitely do not have that authority.) You may experience similar errors on websites you try to load this morning, even ones you don’t regularly visit. As part of this article, for example, I would google queries and click the top results to websites I had never heard of before, only to encounter similar error messages.
That’s because a large portion of the global internet relies on Cloudflare to operate. Cloudflare offers a host of services to companies, including web infrastructure and cybersecurity products. As such, when Cloudflare goes down, so do many of those websites—a bit of a domino effect.
It’s not clear at this time what brought on the outage, but, as spotted by Techradar, Cloudflare had announced scheduled maintenance for some of its web servers for Nov. 18, ranging from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. UTC (7am to 10am ET), so it’s possible something happened during this work to break service.
The good news is, it appears that many of these sites are back up and running—at least, at this time. At 8:09 a.m. ET, Cloudflare reported it had identified the issue, and was working on a fix. While the official status page still says the Cloudflare Global Network is experiencing issues, the hope is the company will resolve these issues quickly.
While this is indeed a big interruption to the internet, it’s far from the first time this has happened. In fact, an AWS (Amazon Web Services) outage broke the internet last month. With the Cloudflare outage this morning, it’s an example of the risks of so many companies putting their web services needs in the same basket: If one servicer goes, so too goes a huge fraction of the web.
Cloudflare will likely patch this issue sometime Tuesday, so I imagine we’ll all be back to business as usual soon enough. I’ll keep this article updated with developments as they come.
