ISLAMABAD: Services on major platforms including ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), Canva, Zoom etc are reportedly being restored after a global outage earlier on Tuesday.
The disruption, linked to internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare, caused widespread error messages and inaccessibility across multiple high-profile websites.
According to international media reports, Cloudflare, which provides network and security services to millions of websites and internet service providers globally, said on its status page that a fix had been implemented by 9:42 a.m. ET. The company believes the incident has now been resolved, while continuing to monitor its systems to ensure all services are fully restored.
Cloudflare reportedly experienced a spike in “unusual traffic” to one of its services, which triggered temporary restrictions for users in the United Kingdom. The company has also apologised for the outage, describing it as a “significant outage” caused by a configuration file designed to manage threat traffic failing and “triggering a crash” in its software.
“We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today,” Cloudflare said in a statement, as reported by international media, adding, “Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable.”
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said it is closely monitoring the global outage affecting X and Cloudflare. In a statement, PTA said it is in contact with global platforms and local operators and will continue to observe the situation until services are fully restored.
Reportedly, Cloudflare had also scheduled maintenance for its Santiago, Chile data centre on Tuesday, though reports have not confirmed whether this contributed to the outage. Cybersecurity experts have previously warned of the risks posed by relying heavily on a small number of major tech companies for critical online infrastructure.
The outage affected hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, as reflected on Downdetector, a site tracking internet disruptions, which also experienced errors during the incident. Many users reported delays or technical issues while accessing apps and websites, including social media platform X, which displayed an internal server error message, and ChatGPT, which prompted users with “please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed.”
The outage also affected several prominent services in Pakistan, including Profit, along with several other news websites, which experienced downtime lasting over an hour.
Cloudflare issued a status update at around 5 pm. acknowledging the disruption, stating, “We are aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers.” The company assured users that it was working to mitigate the problem and fully understand its impact.
About 20 minutes later, Cloudflare reported that disruptions were easing, but continued to monitor the situation. By 6:15 pm., the company confirmed that error levels for some of its services had “returned to pre-incident rates” but emphasised that some services were still being restored.
Cloudflare services are used by approximately 20% of all websites worldwide, performing critical security functions such as verifying that visitor connections come from humans rather than bots. The wide-reaching outage underscored the reliance of global internet platforms on a handful of infrastructure providers like Cloudflare, Microsoft, and Amazon.
While Cloudflare reportedly said the issue has been resolved, some services may continue to experience intermittent errors as systems come fully back online.
