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Internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare says it believes it has resolved an issue that led to outages for the social media platform X, some multiplayer games and ChatGPT, among others.
Cloudflare, a content delivery network that provides network and security products to internet service providers, said on its status page earlier on Tuesday that it was aware of and investigating an issue that was impacting multiple customers.
By 9:42 a.m. ET, it said 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.”
Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, Dane Knecht, wrote in a post on X that the company failed its customers and “the broader internet,” but said the issue didn’t stem from a cyberattack.
Some users might still be experiencing issues using Cloudflare services, the company said after deploying the fix. Earlier on Tuesday, there were widespread reports of so-called 500 errors, as well as Cloudflare Dashboard and API failing.
The outage seemingly prevented thousands of users from accessing platforms such as Canva, X, Grindr and ChatGPT, according to reports logged on outage-tracking site Downdetector.
Reports about issues with Cloudflare had, however, come down to about 600 by 8 a.m. ET, from a peak of nearly 5,000.
CBC News has reached out to Cloudflare for a statement. A spokesperson said the company saw a spike in “unusual traffic” to one of Cloudflare’s services this morning, and that it will post an in-depth analysis detailing what happened at a later time.
In the process of remediating the issue, Cloudflare said on its status page that it had to temporarily disable certain services for users in the United Kingdom.
Cloudflare had scheduled maintenance for its data centre in Santiago, Chile, on Tuesday.
Some cybersecurity experts have warned for years about the potentially ugly consequences of allowing a handful of big tech companies to underpin the online world’s infrastructure.