Cloudflare Down: Major Global Outage Disrupts ChatGPT, X, Claude AI, Spotify, Canva, and Other web sites

Cloudflare US company that defends millions of websites against malicious attacks suffers unidentified problem.

Internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare experiences widespread service disruption, taking down dozens of popular websites and platforms for millions worldwide.

If you couldn't access X, ChatGPT, or Spotify this morning, you weren't alone. A major outage at Cloudflare, one of the internet's key infrastructure providers, knocked out access to dozens of popular websites and services on Monday.

What Went Down

The list of affected services reads like a who's who of the internet. X (formerly Twitter) saw over 9,700 user reports on Downdetector at the peak of the outage. OpenAI's ChatGPT, Claude AI and DALL-E services went dark. Design tool Canva stopped working. Music fans couldn't stream on Spotify. Gamers couldn't log into League of Legends or Valorant. Gaming chat platform like Discord also Disrupts. Even PayPal, Uber and other websites had intermittent hiccups.

What User See

User only seeing this error message "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed." in all affected sites.

Clarification from company

While the cause remains unclear, Woodward said it was unlikely to be a cyber-attack as a service so large is unlikely to have a single point of failure.

By 7:21 AM ET, Cloudflare said services were starting to recover, though "customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts." The company also had to temporarily disable its WARP service in London during the fix, affecting users who depend on it for internet access.

Cloudflare had scheduled maintenance at its Santiago datacenter between 12:00 and 15:00 UTC on Monday. While the company hasn't confirmed whether the maintenance triggered the global meltdown, the coincidence has people asking questions.

The company emphasized that "the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented," though specifics about the root cause haven't been released yet.