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ZDNET's key takeaways
- A Cloudflare issue has taken many websites offline.
- Affected sites include X, ChatGPT, and more.
- The outages are eerily similar to ones earlier this year.
It's not just you, another internet outage is taking down some of your favorite sites this morning.
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Around 7 a.m. ET, reports spiked that users were having trouble accessing X. Other sites, including the popular game League of Legends, ChatGPT, and Spotify were also down. Users quickly connected the dots and figured out all of those sites use Cloudflare to make their sites faster, and, ironically, more reliable.
Eerily similar
While not as widespread, the outages seem eerily similar to earlier this year when hundreds of sites went offline due to Cloudflare problems, and similar to the massive CrowdStrike outage last year. This isn't just an American problem either, as reports are flooding in from all across the globe.
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Even downdetector.com, a popular site for tracking outages that's owned by ZDNET parent company Ziff Davis, appeared to be down. When I tried to access it this morning to assess how widespread the problems were, I got a message that said, “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”
Cloudlare is investigating
Cloudflare has confirmed the issue on its system status page, saying, “Investigating — Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly.”
The company added in later updates that it's “continuing to investigate this issue,” but it didn't offer a potential timeline for resolution.
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As of 8 a.m. ET, X was still down, as I got a message saying, “Internal server error Error code 500 Visit cloudflare.com for more information” when I tried to access the site.
I'll update this piece as this story progresses.
