Cloudflare restores services after outage impacts thousands of internet users

By Jaspreet Singh

(Reuters) -Cloudflare has fully restored its services after an outage on Tuesday at the web-infrastructure company prevented thousands from accessing major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT.

The company said the outage that began around 6.30 a.m. ET was caused by an automatically generated configuration file, designed to manage potential security threats.

The file grew too large and crashed the software system handling traffic for several Cloudflare services, the company, whose network handles around a fifth of web traffic, said.

The company said it has started to investigate and has deployed a fix but some customers might still be impacted as it recovers service globally. Its shares were down 2.3% in morning trading.

Cloudflare said there was "no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity". It runs one of the world's largest networks that helps websites and apps load faster and stay online by protecting them from traffic surges and cyberattacks.

Last month, an outage at Amazon's cloud service caused global turmoil as thousands of popular websites and apps, including Snapchat and Reddit, were inaccessible due to the disruption.

The latest outage at Cloudflare prevented thousands of users from accessing platforms such as Canva, X, Grindr and ChatGPT, prompting users to log outage reports with Downdetector.

X and ChatGPT-creator OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment. Reports about issues with Cloudflare dropped to about 2,800 by 10:20 a.m. ET from a peak of over 11,000, the outage-tracking tool showed.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources. Since the numbers are based on user-submitted reports, the actual number of affected users may vary.

"We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare's services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare's network to experience errors," the company said earlier in the day.

(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar, Anil D'Silva and Arun Koyyur)