OpenAI, X and other major sites down amid Cloudflare outage. Here's what we know so far

Major websites, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Facebook and the social media platform X, have been hit by technical issues after a Cloudflare outage on Tuesday.

However, several hours after reporting there was an issue, the company said on Tuesday afternoon that “a fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved”.

“We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” it added.

Cloudflare provides the technology that powers many of today’s websites and platforms by helping them protect against hackers and keep websites online amid heavy traffic.

Tracking website Down Detector, which monitors outages, was also hit by the technical problems.

What caused the issue?

Cloudflare said it suffered "widespread 500 errors, [with] Dashboard and API also failing".

500 error codes are a general message that means a server has encountered an unexpected condition that prevents it from fulfilling the request. It means the server knows there is an issue but cannot specify exactly what.

In remediating the issue, Cloudflare said it had to temporarily disable certain services for United Kingdom users.

“We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates. We have re-enabled WARP access in London,” the company wrote on its status page. “We are continuing to work towards restoring other services”.

Recent internet failures

The outage follows recent internet failures from the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft's Azure.

In October, AWS had a problem caused by an issue with companies connecting to AWS's data services in the United States, which impacted internet services worldwide.

"During today’s outage, news sites, payments, public information pages and community services all froze," said Graeme Stewart, head of public sector at cybersecurity company Check Point.

"That was not because each organisation failed on its own. It was because a single layer they all rely on stopped responding. People saw a simple error page, but the breach reached into the systems that hold up essential services," he said, adding that this is a major cybersecurity issue.

"Any platform that carries this much of the world’s traffic becomes a target. Even an accidental outage creates noise and uncertainty that attackers know how to use," he said.