Dozens of websites and apps, including ChatGPT, X and Uber, were disrupted early Tuesday after the widely used cybersecurity service Cloudflare suffered an outage.
The website Downdetector, which tracks outages based on user input, had logged tens of thousands of outage reports for a wide array of popular applications.
In an update on its website shortly before 7 a.m. Eastern time, the company said some services might be intermittently impacted because of an “internal service degradation.” As of 9:42 a.m., the company said it had resolved the underlying issue.
“A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved,” the company said. “We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”
It’s the latest in multiple disruptions that major U.S. cloud service vendors have suffered in recent weeks. Amazon’s outage last month of its cloud-computing division impacted such services as Slack, Snapchat, Pinterest, Venmo and Apple TV. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Microsoft’s Azure cloud service also went down last month, disrupting Xbox, Starbucks and Minecraft.
Founded in 2009, San Francisco-based Cloudflare is used by one out of five websites for web security, according to the tech statistics company W3Techs.
Cloudflare has become an essential part of the modern internet, facilitating the faster loading of webpages by storing multiple copies of a website’s data in its data centers in more than 330 cities around the globe, according to an explanation of its services by the company. It also detects and blocks DDoS, or distributed denial of service, cyberattacks that can take down a website by flooding it with malicious requests.
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