Cloudflare outage triggers ChatGPT, Canva, other internet services to standstill

A massive outage at web infrastructure giant Cloudflare has caused widespread disruption across the internet, taking down thousands of websites and services including X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Discord, and Canva.

The disruption, which began earlier today, November 18, triggered a wave of internal server errors for users worldwide, effectively cutting off access to large swathes of the digital ecosystem. 

Cloudflare has confirmed the incident and stated that while a fix has been implemented, services are still in the process of recovering.

In a statement, the company acknowledged the severity of the outage, saying that “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.”

The company later updated that they identified the source of the issue, which was a spike in unusual traffic that caused internal service degradation. 

As of the latest update, Cloudflare engineers have implemented a fix and are monitoring the results. “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,” the company said.

For now, users are advised that while many sites are coming back online, intermittent errors and slow loading times may persist as traffic reroutes and systems stabilize.