Cloudflare down: Internet stops working properly amid major outage

Problems comes just weeks after worldwide technical issues that broke sites including ChatGPT and X

Cloudflare has gone down, taking many other websites down with it.

The outage affected much of the web: X, formerly known as Twitter, Substack, Canva and more appeared to have gone down. Notably, that included Down Detector, a tracking website that shows outages around the world.

Some sites that had been caught up in a major outage last month were not affected, however, presumably they had make themselves less reliant on Cloudflare in the time since. That included ChatGPT.

Visitors to a number of pages saw a “500 internet server error” warning, rather than the content they expected.

The problems come just two-and-a-half weeks after Cloudflare was hit by major issues that took it offline for hours.

The company offers web infrastructure services that power many of the world’s biggest websites. Generally, it ensures that pages are able to stay online even amid heavy traffic, by sitting in the middle of the pages and visitors.

That means, however, that any outage at Cloudflare can immediately take down many other, seemingly unconnected, websites.