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

A major outage at Cloudflare temporarily struck several high-traffic websites, including X, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Google Cloud and Canva were also down. Users were unable to see posts made on the platform or upload new tweets. On X, a message appeared: 'Cannot retrieve posts at this time. Please try again later.'

The disruption began around 5 pm IST. Users trying to access websites that use Cloudflare services were shown the message, "internal server error on Cloudflare's network, please try again in a few minutes."

Cloudflare, a critical internet infrastructure provider, powers many aspects of the modern web, including content delivery, security, and traffic management. When its systems go down, the effects ripple across the internet, impacting a range of unrelated services.

In a statement, Cloudflare acknowledged the issue and confirmed that it was "aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers." However, the company did not provide any further details on the cause or a timeline for resolution.

In its latest update, Cloudflare said: "We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates. We have re-enabled WARP access in London."

In one post, the infrastructure provider said the issue had been identified and a fix was being implemented. "Some customers may be still experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard. We are working on a fix to resolve this, and continuing to monitor for any further issues," it said. 

The outage also affected Downdetector, the widely used site for tracking online disruptions, which itself relies on Cloudflare's infrastructure. As a result, Downdetector was briefly unavailable, although it later registered a surge in reports of outages for platforms like X and Spotify.

Cloudflare later provided an update, stating that services were starting to recover but that "customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates." However, some platforms, including X and ChatGPT, continued to experience issues. 

As screens went blank, users turned to the few working platforms, such as Reddit and Threads, to express their frustration about the "internet meltdown". "My entire staff portal and sites are using Cloudflare, so everything is down," a netizen said.

Another took a dig at how the outage happened just after maintenance. "Cloudflare being down, and almost all of my most visited websites and mobile banking are also down with them, means that it's probably not smart for these companies to put all of their cybersecurity eggs in one basket."   

List of services affected

X (formerly Twitter)

Spotify

OpenAI platforms, including ChatGPT

Perplexity

Gemini

Canva

Letterboxd

Bet365

League of Legends

Sage

Downdetector (experienced partial failure)