Cloudflare outage disrupts access to ChatGPT and X worldwide

ChatGPT, social-media platform X, and NJ Transit were among the websites blocking some users’ access on Tuesday as the web security firm Cloudflare worked to address a widespread, worldwide networking outage.

Cloudflare was investigating an issue that “potentially impacts multiple customers”, the San Francisco-based company said on its website.

The same page shows Cloudflare had been experiencing issues with a customer support portal, and had been scheduled to conduct some maintenance in some areas earlier in the day.

At one point, Cloudflare’s own outage status website wasn’t loading.

About an hour into the disruption, Cloudflare said it was “seeing services recover” but warned customers would continue to see “higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts”.

Cloudflare’s software is used by hundreds of thousands of companies globally, acting as a sort of buffer between their websites and end users and working to protect their sites from attacks that might overload them with traffic.