Sites across the web aren’t loading, with some displaying an error message saying, ‘Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.’
Sites across the web aren’t loading, with some displaying an error message saying, ‘Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.’
Cloudflare, a networking company that provides DDoS protection and internet content delivery services for many companies around the globe, is working to fix a major outage that’s taking down sites across the web. Users are running into an error message when they try to access X and ChatGPT, with some sites saying “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”
Even the outage-tracking website DownDetector went down, though the site now appears to be recovering. On Cloudflare’s status page, the most recent update from the company, posted at 8:35AM ET, says “We are continuing working on restoring service for application services customers.”
In a statement to The Verge, Cloudflare spokesperson Jackie Dutton said the company noticed a “spike in unusual traffic” to one of its services starting at 6:20AM ET, causing “some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors.” Dutton added, “We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.” The company is also planning to investigate the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.
Other online services, including NJ Transit, League of Legends, Grindr, Uber, Canva, Spotify, and Archive of Our Own, experienced issues during the outage, while digital outlets like Axios, The Information, and Politico also went down.
The Cloudflare outage comes less than a month after a huge Amazon Web Services crash took down Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, and other services, which was followed by issues at Microsoft Azure that brought Xbox offline for hours.
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