• X, ChatGPT, mainstream services struggle

A MAJOR global Internet glitch occurred yesterday, causing widespread disruptions across numerous popular websites and online services.
The cause was traced to a technical issue at Internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare.

The outage, which began at 9 a.m., left users unable to access platforms, showing significant errors on services including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, and other OpenAI services.
Checks revealed that the outage also affected various services, including banking, healthcare, and logistics, among others.
Website Down Detector, which monitors outages, was also hit by the technical problems. But when it loaded, it showed a dramatic spike in problems.

Affected users saw a message indicating there was an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network”. It asked users to “please try again in a few minutes”.

For emphasis, Cloudflare is a critical Content Delivery Network (CDN) and security provider, managing approximately one-third of all global Internet traffic. The company’s internal service degradation resulted in widespread HTTP 500 errors for websites that rely on its network.
Experts have highlighted that these incidents, following recent outages at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, underscored the Internet’s heavy and, in some opinions, fragile reliance on a few core infrastructure providers.

The incident has had real-world consequences, particularly for travellers who reported being unable to complete or check their electronic visa applications, effectively paralysing administrative travel procedures for a period.

Cloudflare confirmed it was investigating the issue, which impacted multiple customers, including its own Dashboard and API.
However, the company stated late yesterday that a fix had been implemented and that services would return gradually.

However, Cloudflare stressed that “customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates” as remediation efforts continue and all services are brought back to normal.