Global outage hits X, other websites

Major internet platforms, including X, were inaccessible for thousands of users globally on Tuesday as web-infrastructure firm Cloudflare was hit by an outage, disrupting internet services.

Cloudflare, whose network handles around a fifth of web traffic, said it started to investigate the internal service degradation around 6:40 a.m. ET (12:30 p.m. Nigerian time).

It stated that it has deployed a fix, but some customers might still be impacted as it recovers service.

The incident prevented thousands of users from accessing platforms such as Canva, X, Grindr, and ChatGPT as users logged reports with Downdetector.

Reports about issues with Cloudflare were later reduced to about 600 from a peak of nearly 5,000, the outage-tracking tool showed.

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Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources. Since the numbers are based on user-submitted reports, the actual number of affected users may vary.

The company said in a statement: “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors.

“We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”

X and ChatGPT-creator OpenAI did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

The outage is the latest to hit internet services. Microsoft’s Azure had also faced an issue last month, while disruption at Amazon AWS caused global turmoil among thousands of websites and some of the most popular apps, such as Snapchat and Reddit, in October.

The Star