Cloudflare down: Company blames 'unusual' spike in traffic before outage errors

On Tuesday, Cloudflare, a key player in internet infrastructure, faced a significant outage that impacted numerous major websites across the globe. Notably affected were OpenAI's ChatGPT and Elon Musk's platform, X, as reported by Downdetector, which also experienced accessibility issues for certain users. According to a Cloudflare spokesperson, the company detected a "spike in unusual traffic" directed at one of its services around 6:20 a.m. ET. This influx caused errors for some of the traffic processed through its network. The spokesperson stated, "We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic," adding that the team is working diligently to ensure all traffic is processed correctly. Cloudflare has committed to ongoing investigations and has provided updates on its system status page. The company's software is integral for many businesses worldwide, as it safeguards and manages traffic for a substantial number of websites. Among its critical offerings is protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, where malicious entities aim to overwhelm a website's system by flooding it with excessive traffic requests. Following the outage, Cloudflare's shares dipped by over 5% in premarket trading. This incident comes on the heels of a recent prolonged outage at Amazon Web Services, which disrupted numerous online services, and a subsequent global outage affecting Microsoft's Azure cloud and 365 services.