OpenAI, X and several major websites went down

The global outage was caused by a Cloudflare disruption.

Cloudflare powers a large part of today’s internet infrastructure, helping countless websites protect themselves against cyberattacks and stay online during high traffic periods.

After the Cloudflare outage, major platforms such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Facebook, and X experienced technical failures.

Cloudflare released a brief statement saying it was “aware of an issue potentially affecting multiple customers and is investigating.” The company added that services have begun to recover, but users may continue to see higher-than-normal error rates as fixes are being applied.

Cloudflare reported a widespread “500 error” affecting its Dashboard and API as well.A 500 error indicates that a server encountered an unexpected condition preventing it from fulfilling a request — the server knows something went wrong but cannot identify the exact cause.

WHAT’S GOING ON?This incident comes after a series of recent internet outages affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

In October, AWS experienced a major disruption due to issues connecting companies to its data services, which affected global internet operations. During the outage, news websites, payment systems, public information pages, and essential community services were all frozen for extended periods.

Source: Euronews

Photo: AP