Update November 18, 10:30am Eastern: ChatGPT appears to be back online now as the outage appears to have been rectified. Original story follows.
Happy Tuesday! At least it is, so long as you don’t work at one of the range of services being affected by the massive Cloudflare outage.
If you’re trying to use ChatGPT today, you’re likely being met with a message that says “please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.” You didn’t do anything wrong, Cloudflare’s problems have spread to services that rely on it.
Copilot has entered the chat.
Microsoft’s own Chatbot which uses OpenAI‘s GPT models on the backend is still working fine, presumably insulated by using Microsoft’s own tech rather than relying on Cloudflare.
Cloudflare provides help for websitesby providing services such as content delivery (CDN), protection against cyberattacks such as DDoS, DNS, and traffic optimization. When it goes down, it takes all of those with it for any company that’s using Cloudflare.
Is there anything you can do?
ChatGPT may be down, but Copilot is alive and well. (Image credit: Windows Central)
Unfortunately, this isn’t one of those issues where you can find a workaround. Because the issue is taking place at some great server factory that these services rely on, you’re stuck.
ChatGPT isn’t the only service affected, either. I’ve seen myself this morning issues with PayPal and X, with the former interfering with my lunch order, no less.
If you absolutely need an AI chatbot to turn to while ChatGPT is unavailable, Microsoft’s Copilot is working fine. It uses mostly the same AI models as ChatGPT, with the added bonus (right now) of no Cloudflare.
The error being shown on ChatGPT right now. (Image credit: Windows Central)
All we know is that Cloudflare is working on it. Some of the affected services have sporadically returned, but there are still widespread issues. X, in particular, seems to have been hit as hard as ChatGPT, with many users worldwide unable to load the main feed.
Cloudflare is constantly updating its own status page (which, hilariously, also went down briefly) with progress, but sadly, it’s a waiting game until we can access things again. OpenAI is also updating its own status page which is the best way to keep tabs on progress specific to ChatGPT.