It's not just you: Cloudflare, and half the Internet, is down

• Cloudflare outage disrupts major sites worldwide, including X and ChatGPT.

• Cloudflare powers ~32.8% of top 10k sites, so many services and banks may be affected.

• Cloudflare confirmed internal degradation and is working on remediation; services may intermittently recover.

Major server providers going down, and taking a good chunk of websites with them, appears to be a common occurrence these days. Cloudflare is one of the biggest ones, and today's outage might have you struggling to browse a sizable part of the Internet this morning.

Cloudflare is currently down for many users around the world, taking with it websites like X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, and more. Ironically, it's so widely used that it has also taken down websites like Is It Down Right Now, which allows users to look at outages of various major services. Issues can range from websites being partially broken, with some subpages or features not working, to being completely down and unusable while the outage lasts. Cloudflare powers approximately 32.8% of the top 10,000 websites, so it's a pretty significant outage that's going to affect pretty much every part of your online experience—from your favorite social media services to trivial stuff like your bank.

Cloudflare has, for its own part, confirmed the outage. The company clarified on its own status check website that its services are "experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly." It issued another update shortly after, saying that "we're seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts," but for what it's worth, a lot of stuff is still down as I write this.

Just weeks ago, we had a couple of back-to-back major service provider outages that also took the Internet down. An identical outage struck Amazon Web Services (AWS), which powers a slightly larger chunk of websites, and just days later, a Microsoft Azure outage also broke a lot of stuff. Chances are that a lot of the stuff that wasn't down those two days is currently down as we speak, unless the website you're visiting does full self-hosting. Some websites might even use multiple cloud providers at once. The only major service provider that hasn't been affected by an outage recently is Google's Cloud Platform—here's hoping I don't jinx it.

As I write this, Cloudflare is hard at work restoring services, so it might already be back by the time you read this.

Source: Cloudflare