Major outage at Cloudflare takes down X, ChatGPT: Users hit with 'try again later' message

A significant outage at Cloudflare has led to the temporary shutdown of several popular websites, notably X and OpenAI's ChatGPT, along with Gemini and Perplexity. Users encountered frustrating messages indicating, 'Cannot retrieve posts at this time. Please try again later,' as the disruption began around 5 PM IST. Individuals attempting to access sites relying on Cloudflare services faced a warning stating, 'Internal server error on Cloudflare's network, please try again in a few minutes.' As a vital provider of internet infrastructure, Cloudflare supports numerous functions across the web, including content delivery and security. Therefore, when its systems falter, the impact spreads widely, affecting various unrelated services. In response to the situation, Cloudflare issued a statement acknowledging the problem and confirming its awareness of the issue affecting multiple customers. However, they refrained from sharing further information regarding the root cause or an estimated time for resolution. In a later update, the company indicated progress, stating, 'We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover.' They noted that error rates for WARP and Access users had returned to normal. Cloudflare also mentioned that the issue had been identified and steps were being taken to implement a fix. Interestingly, the outage impacted Downdetector, a popular platform for monitoring online service disruptions, which relies on Cloudflare's infrastructure. As a result, Downdetector experienced temporary unavailability but later noted a spike in outage reports from users on platforms like X and Spotify. Although Cloudflare reported that services were beginning to recover, they cautioned that customers might still experience elevated error rates. As of the latest update, some platforms, including X and ChatGPT, continued to face ongoing issues. This incident closely follows an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage earlier in the week that had already caused widespread disruptions.