Cloudflare (NET.N) has fully restored its services after an outage on Tuesday that prevented thousands of users from accessing major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT.

Cause of the Outage

The company reported that the outage, which began around 6:30 a.m. ET, was caused by an automatically generated configuration file designed to manage potential security threats.

• This file grew beyond the expected number of entries,

• Leading to a crash in the software system responsible for handling traffic across several Cloudflare services.

Cloudflare also noted it detected a spike in unusual traffic around 5:20 a.m. ET.
However, the company confirmed there was no evidence of an attack or malicious activity.

Impact on OpenAI Services

OpenAI’s status page indicated that ChatGPT and its Sora short-form video app have both fully recovered after experiencing service issues caused by the “third-party service provider,” referring to Cloudflare.

Cloudflare’s Response

A Cloudflare spokesperson stated:

“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologize to our customers and the internet in general for letting you down today.”

Cloudflare’s platform helps manage and secure traffic for about 20% of the web, providing protection against DDoS attacks and other threats.
Following the outage, Cloudflare shares fell more than 2%.

Recent Industry Outages

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Less than a month earlier, AWS suffered a day-long disruption that affected numerous global online services.

Microsoft Azure & 365

This was followed by a global outage impacting Azure and Microsoft 365 services.

CrowdStrike Outage

A faulty software update from CrowdStrike caused a major worldwide outage, affecting:

• Flights

• Financial services

• Hospitals (leading to delayed procedures)