UK-based internet infrastructure company, Cloudflare, experienced a disruption today, causing several prominent websites to become inaccessible to users worldwide.
According to Downdetector, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Shopify’s e-commerce platform, and Elon Musk’s X social media platform (formerly Twitter) are also being impacted by the Cloudflare issues, with some users unable to access Downdetector itself.
ChatGPT and the Sora short-form video app experienced problems due to “an issue with one of our third-party service providers”, according to OpenAI’s status page.
According to a Cloudflare spokesperson, a sudden increase in unusual traffic was noticed to one of its services at approximately 6:20 a.m. ET, resulting in errors for some traffic passing through its network.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson added. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
The company stated that it was “continuing to work on restoring service” in a posted update on its status page at 8:35 a.m. ET.
In Ghana major websites including Citinewsroom, 3newsonline, ameyawdebrah.com have all been impacted.
Cloudflare’s software is used by numerous businesses globally, facilitating the management and security of traffic for approximately 20% of the web. Services offered by it include protection against distributed denial of service attacks, where malicious actors attempt to overload a website’s system with an excessive number of traffic requests, rendering it unable to function.
Cloudflare shares dropped by over 5% in early morning trading. A disruption occurred less than a month after Amazon Web Services experienced a daylong outage that affected multiple online services, followed by a global outage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud and 365 services.
