ChatGPT and X hit by outage at online security group Cloudflare

Online security company Cloudflare suffered a widespread global outage on Tuesday, forcing popular sites such as X and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to go offline for some users.

The San Francisco-based company said it had resolved the problem following several hours of disruption across a range of its customers’ apps and websites.

Cloudflare said the outage was caused by a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. It added the file “grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services”.

The group added there was no evidence of any malicious activity.

Cloudflare’s technology powers a significant part of the internet, with more than 20 per cent of all websites relying on its software, according to W3Techs. Its services include protecting websites against cyber security threats such as web browsing attacks.

Other groups hit by Tuesday’s outage included retailer Ikea and image-editing app Canva, according to Downdetector, which collects user reports of website problems. The websites for the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority and domestic intelligence agency MI5 were also affected.

Some listeners tuning in to Home Depot’s quarterly results on the retailer’s website were blocked because of the outage, the company said in a securities filing.

The incident comes just a month after Amazon’s cloud business experienced a large outage, which hit a range of groups, including ride-hailing app Lyft, coffee chain Starbucks, Lloyds Bank and ChatGPT.

Shares in Cloudflare, which went public in 2019 and has a market value of $71bn, were down 1.4 per cent in afternoon trading on Tuesday.