On Tuesday, some users faced limited access to major platforms such as ChatGPT and social network X due to technical problems encountered by Cloudflare Inc., a web security firm. According to Bloomberg, the company initiated an investigation into issues affecting many of its clients.
Cloudflare reported difficulties with its support portal and had planned scheduled maintenance in various regions. At one point, their own site, which displays outage statuses, was also inaccessible.
About an hour after the problems began, Cloudflare announced that it was observing a restoration of services but warned that clients might still experience higher than usual error rates as troubleshooting continued.
Hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide rely on Cloudflare's software, which acts as a protective barrier between their websites and users, helping to prevent attacks that can overwhelm traffic.
This is not the first time Cloudflare has faced similar issues. In July 2019, a software glitch caused thousands of websites to go offline for 30 minutes, including platforms like Medium, Discord, SoundCloud, Coinbase, and Dropbox. In June 2022, another outage affected traffic across 19 data centers, leading to the shutdown of several major sites for an hour and a half.