{"id":1703,"date":"2025-11-18T22:30:54","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T18:30:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.actutech.app\/a-massive-cloudflare-outage-brought-down-x-chatgpt-and-even-downdetector\/"},"modified":"2025-11-18T22:30:54","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T18:30:54","slug":"a-massive-cloudflare-outage-brought-down-x-chatgpt-and-even-downdetector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/a-massive-cloudflare-outage-brought-down-x-chatgpt-and-even-downdetector\/","title":{"rendered":"A massive Cloudflare outage brought down X, ChatGPT, and even Downdetector"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cloudflare, a networking company that provides DDoS protection and internet content delivery services for many companies around the globe, is recovering after a major outage that took down sites across the web. Users weren\u2019t able to access X, ChatGPT<\/a>, and even the outage-tracking site DownDetector on Tuesday morning, with some sites displaying an error message that said, \u201cPlease unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.\u201d <\/p>\n

The disruption, which started at around 6:20AM ET, is linked to a \u201cconfiguration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic,\u201d Cloudflare spokesperson Jackie Dutton tells The Verge<\/em>. \u201cThe file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare\u2019s services.\u201d Dutton added that \u201cthere is no evidence\u201d of an attack or other malicious activity.<\/p>\n

Cloudflare posted an update to its status page<\/a> at 9:42AM ET, saying: \u201cA fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht wrote in a post on X<\/a> that the service \u201cfailed\u201d its customers and the broader internet, adding that \u201ca latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made\u2026 This was not an attack.\u201d<\/p>\n

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I won\u2019t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare<\/a> network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2014 Dane Knecht \ud83e\uddad (@dok2001) November 18, 2025<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Other online services, including Indeed, Grindr, Uber, Canva, Spotify, NJ Transit, League of Legends<\/em>, and Archive of Our Own, experienced issues during the outage, while digital outlets like Axios<\/em>, The Information<\/em>, and Politico<\/em> also went down.<\/p>\n

The Cloudflare outage comes less than a month after a huge Amazon Web Services crash took down Fortnite<\/em><\/a>, Alexa, Snapchat, and other services, which was followed by issues at Microsoft Azure that brought Xbox offline<\/a> for hours.<\/p>\n

Update, November 18th: <\/strong>Added an update from Cloudflare.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cloudflare, a networking company that provides DDoS protection and internet content delivery services for many companies around the globe, is […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-classe"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}