Life online seems to be returning to normal after a major outage centered on Cloudflare’s WARP service. Sporadic outages still possible for the next few hours.
It started out being a rough morning for many who depend on AI platforms. Thanks to an unknown issue at Cloudflare, ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and Claude — along with many other popular websites — were unreachable by many for several hours this morning. Here at FOSS Force, access to ChatGPT and Perplexity was restored at about 9:45 AM EST. Claude also appears to be operational, although we didn’t go through its signup process to be sure.
Cloudflare, the content delivery network that’s ironically often responsible for keeping sites operating through the worst distributed denial-of-services attacks, seems to have been ground zero for this morning’s outage.
We noticed the issue first thing this morning when we booted our computers to begin our day. Perplexity’s network was offering the rather cryptic message to “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.” A quick search on DuckDuckGo revealed that news sites everywhere were reporting a major outage centered on Cloudflare, which at 8:09 AM EST reported on its website, “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.” That message was followed four minutes later by a message indicating that a fix was in place:
“We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates.
We have re-enabled WARP access in London.“We are continuing to work towards restoring other services.”
WARP is Cloudflare’s encrypted connection client for private app and network access. Cloudflare has issued other updates since.
A short list of the sites that were affected includes:
- X
- ChatGPT
- Sora
- Claude AI
- Spotify
- Uber
- Canva
- Quizlet
- Indeed
- DoorDash
- Varo
- NJ Transit
- Zoom
- UPS
- Dayforce
- Vivaldi
Earlier there were reports that Amazon was down, but it was functioning again by the time we looked.
The last report from Cloudflare before press time was at 9:59 AM:
“Some customers may be still experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard. We are working on a fix to resolve this, and continuing to monitor for any further issues.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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