X and more apps hit by internet outage

A number of high-profile websites, including X and ChatGPT, are unavailable because of problems affecting the major internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare.

Thousands of users reported issues with X and other services to outage monitoring site Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT on Tuesday.

On its homepage, X displays a message saying there is a problem with its internal server, which it says is a result of an “error” originating with Cloudflare.

ChatGPT has an error message which reads “please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed.”

“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers,” the company said in a note on its service status dashboard at 11:48 UTC.

In a subsequent update, the company said it was “seeing services recover” but added customers “may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts”.

Cloudflare is a huge provider of internet security across the world, carrying out services such as checking visitor connections to sites are coming from humans rather than bots.

It says 20% of all websites worldwide use its services in some form.

It is unclear how many of those websites have been affected by this outage, and to what extent.

Downdetector itself – a site many flock to when sites stop loading or appear to have issues – also displayed an error message as many tried to access it on Tuesday.

Issues affecting Cloudflare’s services come after an outage impacting Amazon Web Services last month saw more than 1,000 sites and apps knocked offline.

Another major web services provider, Microsoft Azure, was also affected shortly afterwards.

Some experts suggest such incidents highlight the fragility of the modern internet, and the profound disruption that can be caused by problems at the small number of companies underpinning it.