When you try to visit a website affected by the Cloudflare outage, you'll likely see an error 500 code and a message such as "There is an internal server error on Cloudflare's network," along with a suggestion to "try again in a few minutes."
Cloudflare is aware of the problem and is working on a fix. The company posted a system status update at 6:48 AM EST stating that "Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate."
In its latest update at 9:22 AM EST, Cloudflare says it is "continuing to work on a fix for this issue."
A lot of different sites and apps are affected by this
The outage is similar to what occurred to AWS in October
The outage-tracking website Downdetector was ironically affected by the Cloudflare outage earlier but has since recovered. Currently, tons of reports on Downdetector detail outages for various apps and websites, including X, OpenAI (ChatGPT), League of Legends, Runescape, Uber, Canva, Indeed, and even New Jersey Transit.
When I tried to open ChatGPT, I received an error message that said, "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed." When I attempted to open X on Google Chrome, I encountered an "Internal server error" with error code 500. On my iPhone, the X app wouldn't load at all.
Cloudflare is a service used by hundreds of websites and apps online, providing networking solutions that help sites manage traffic and security. For example, Cloudflare helps websites prevent DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks and efficiently routes traffic from users through its global networks to avoid congestion and slowdowns.
This isn't the first major internet outage recently, as Amazon Web Services (AWS) also experienced a widespread outage in October that brought down major apps like Spotify, Apple Music, Venmo, and Snapchat for a day.
A Cloudflare spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge that the company experienced a "spike in unusual traffic" to one of its servers at 6:20 AM ET, which began causing "some traffic passing through Cloudflare's network to experience errors." Cloudflare doesn't yet know the cause of this unusual traffic spike, but says it will investigate.
For now, Cloudflare is urgently working on a fix to get all its websites and services back online, so hopefully everything will be up and running properly soon.
