What Is Cloudflare, And Why Did Its Outage Take Down X, ChatGPT, And Parts Of The Web?

• Cloudflare is a U.S.-based company that offers content delivery services, cybersecurity, and mitigation of distributed denial-of-service attacks, among other things.
• Earlier on Tuesday, the service-tracking site Downdetector showed a massive spike in reports of an OpenAI outage.
• CTO Dane Knecht explained in a post on X that a routine configuration change led to the outage.

Cloudflare Inc. (NET) announced on Tuesday that it has implemented a fix for an outage that is believed to have disrupted several parts of the internet, including social media platform X as well as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, among others.

The firm believes the issue is now resolved and continues to monitor for errors.

CTO Dane Knecht explained in a post on X that a routine configuration change led to the outage.

“A latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack,” Knecht said.

Earlier, service tracking monitor Downdetector showed a massive spike in OpenAI outage reports, with users complaining that ChatGPT was either completely down or that its responses were slow.

Cloudflare shares were down by nearly 3% in Tuesday morning's trade. Retail sentiment on Stocktwits around the company trended in the ‘bearish’ territory at the time of writing.

What Is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is a U.S.-based company that offers content delivery services, cybersecurity, and mitigation of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, among other things.

“Cloudflare helps connect and protect millions of customers globally. Everyone from individuals to the world’s largest enterprises use our unified platform of networking, security, and developer services,” the company says on its website.

Who Uses Cloudflare?

According to the company, Cloudflare services are used by nearly 20% of the websites on the internet. It says that its threat and network intelligence technology is built into every connection and that it is not tied to any one cloud provider, which makes websites resilient against threats and downtimes.

Earlier, an outage at Amazon.com Inc.’s (AMZN) AWS cloud service in October disrupted the company’s own services, with users reporting issues with Gmail, YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat, among others.

NET stock is up 88% year-to-date and 125% over the past 12 months.

Also See: Is ChatGPT Down? OpenAI Says It Is Investigating The Issue

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