Outage at Cloudflare temporarily disrupts access to some popular websites

(NEW YORK) — Web infrastructure company Cloudflare said Tuesday it resolved an issue on its network, which had curtailed access to some popular websites for several hours.

“A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved,” Cloudflare said on its status page at 9:40 a.m. ET.

Dane Knecht, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, posted an apology for the outage around that time, ruling out the possibility of a cyberattack.

“I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in [Cloudflare’s] network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused,” Knecht said in a post on X. “This was not an attack.”

Artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT and social media platform X, which where temporarily down or limited earlier Tuesday, appeared to be available for users as of 10:30 a.m. ET.

Hours earlier, Cloudflare had issued an alert about a problem affecting “multiple customers.”

“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers,” the company said at around 7 a.m. ET.

Minutes later, the company said it had begun to resolve the issue. “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts,” Cloudflare said.

Cloudflare helps companies handle user traffic, including efforts to respond to cyberattacks and load information.

On Tuesday morning, a landing page on X alerted ABC News to an “internal server error,” urging users to “visit cloudflare.com for more information.” A similar warning appeared on ChatGPT’s website, telling ABC News to “please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”

X did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment. Neither did OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.