What Is Cloudflare? The Invisible Service Behind Massive Outage At X, AI Platforms

With microblogging platform X (formerly known as Twitter), OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Canva, and others witnessing an outage on Tuesday evening, web security business Cloudflare company has once found itself at the centre of attention.

According to DownDetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, the disruption began around today evening when an issue with Cloudflare’s support portal provider surfaced, quickly spreading to broader service problems.

Users visiting sites such as X, film review service Letterboxd, design tools like Canva, chatbots like ChatGPT, or specific online games like League of Legends encountered difficulties while accessing the

platforms. Truth Social, the platform backed by Donald Trump, also faced issues during the Cloudflare disruption. Users reported difficulty opening the site and app. Many linked the failure to the same Cloudflare network issue.

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare, which usually works behind the scenes, is part of a large group of web-infrastructure providers that assist websites deliver pages to users. It provides technology to help protect websites against hackers and fake traffic, and to make web pages faster. While usually their work remains hidden, at the time of outage their absence becomes instantly visible.

Several users on Tuesday said that they were unable to use the platform on mobile and computer. On opening X, the viewers received a message from Cloudflare saying that an error had occurred and they should “try again in a few minutes,” The Independent reported.

In many cases, users attempting to reach these websites have reported being blocked by a generic message, such as “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed,” which prevents access to the protected site.

Cloudflare claims to be “one of the world’s largest networks”, with “millions of internet properties”. “Today, businesses, non-profits, bloggers, and anyone with an Internet presence boast faster, more secure websites and apps thanks to Cloudflare,” its website says.

According to The Independent, Cloudflare offers a set of technologies that ensure websites can stay online when they are receiving high amounts of traffic – whether that is coming from an unusually high number of visitors, or an attack designed to take the website down.

Cloudflare and similar companies work between the computers and the original websites themselves. This means any problem at companies such as Cloudflare can affect websites quickly, hence, affecting hundreds of webpages.

Cloudflare’s Statement On Outage

In an initial update, Cloudflare confirmed that it was “aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers”, though it did not share a cause or a timeline for a fix.

“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing. We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly,” it said.

Later, it said, “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts. We are continuing to investigate this issue.”