Reports of outages surge at X and other apps as Cloudflare says it’s having widespread problems
(CBS NEWS) – According to CBS News, reports of outages and problems accessing apps including X and video game League of Legends surged on Tuesday morning amid an issue at web services company Cloudflare, which stated on its system status page that it is investigating an issue affecting “multiple customers.”
Cloudflare said customers were experiencing “widespread 500 errors,” a message indicating that a website’s server is malfunctioning.
“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,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to CBS News. “We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
Thousands of X users reported problems accessing the social media site early Tuesday, as well as people playing League of Legends, according to internet outage tracking site Downdetector.
Cloudflare provides services that help route traffic to its customers’ websites through Domain Name System, or DNS, servers, which can help distribute visits evenly to prevent server overloads and to protect from attacks.
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“A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved,” Cloudflare said at about 9:40 a.m. EDT on Tuesday. “We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”
While the company said it was working on the fix, users continued to report problems accessing sites and app as of 10 a.m. EDT, according to Downdetector.
The issues follow a June glitch at Cloudflare that led to outages at major companies such as Google, OpenAI and Spotify. Coming after two other major outages last month — a 15-hour outage at Amazon Web Services, which disrupted users around the world, and another at Microsoft’s Azure — the latest disruption also raises questions about the reliability of widely used internet services.
“This is the third outage in just over a month, with [Amazon Web Services] and Azure both facing similar issues just weeks ago,” said Mehdi Daoudi, co-founder and CEO of internet reliability company Catchpoint, in an email to CBS News. “In each case, these outages have had cascading effects, disrupting other platforms relying on their services and costing billions of dollars.”
He added, “These incidents highlight the fragility of our online infrastructure, with so many companies relying on just a handful of providers to keep their services running.”
On Tuesday, people reported getting messages such as “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed,” and being unable to access the main site or app for the service they were trying to use. Other apps with reported problems include Spotify, ChatGPT and Downdetector itself.
Cloudflare noted that its customer inquiries aren’t impacted and that business and enterprise clients can reach the company by live chat through the Cloudflare Dashboard, or through its emergency telephone line.
