ChatGPT, X Outage: What Is Cloudflare? 'Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed' Hits Internet

Cloudflare, a leading internet services provider from the USA, crashed yesterday and impacted major online applications like ChatGPT and Elon Musk-led X, among others. The messages 'Is X Down right now?' or 'Is Twitter Down?' escalated like wildfire on social media, while Down Detector tracked outages in ChatGPT. Other applications like Spotify, League of Legends and more are in the list. However, it was a cryptic message that said, "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed" had taken the internet by storm.

Cloudlfare Outage:

As per the DownDetector data, Cloudfare's system started facing troubles before 6:00 pm of November 18, as the internet was flooded with complaints. At around 5:17pm, Downdetector tracked 2,890 complaints. The number of complaints was 2,424 by 8:02 pm yesterday.

56% of the complaints were about problems in server connection, while 30% faced issues on the Cloudflare website and 14% issues are related to DNS.

Many users questioned, 'Is Cloudflare Down' or 'What Is Cloudflare'

Cloudflare issued a statement, "Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing. We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem."

What Is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is one of the biggest networks operating on the Internet. People use Cloudflare services for the purposes of increasing the security and performance of their web sites and services.

The American-based IT company powers Internet requests for millions of websites and serves 81 million HTTP requests per second on average. It provides security and performance, while offering functionality such as SSL and content distribution to every website on its network.

Additionally, Cloudflare offers a free DNS service called 1.1.1.1 that you can use on any device.

Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed

Apart from this, many users reported that they were blocked by a generic message which said, "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed."

The message appeared frequently amidst the outage. It meant that Cloudflare's security systems and challenge pages were malfunctioning despite the website being operational. The message eventually prevented netizens from accessing content even when the site functioned normally.

It needs to be noted that there are many companies who utilizes Cloudflare's infrastructure for content, security and optimization.

Cloudflare Outage: List Of Apps Down

When Cloudflare faced the issue, applications like Twitter, Spotify, ChatGPT, Canva, and League of Legends were impacted at the same time.

What Does Cloudflare Say?

As per the latest update from Cloudflare, operations are many regions are functioning as normal. However, services has been re-routed or partially re-routed on several locations. Cloudflare's last update said, "Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary."

It's system status for several locations said, "Traffic might be re-routed from this location, hence there is a possibility of a slight increase in latency during this maintenance window for end-users in the affected region. For PNI / CNI customers connecting with us in this location, please make sure you are expecting this traffic to fail over elsewhere during this maintenance window as network interfaces in this datacentre may become temporarily unavailable."

Furthermore, Dane Knecht, CTO at Cloudflare Inc, through his LinkedIn post, said, "The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused."

"Transparency about what happened matters, and we plan to share a breakdown with more details in a few hours. In short, the root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare's services," he added.

Also, Knecht said, the Cloudflare team was able to diagnose the issue and revert to a previous version of the file which restored services as of 14:30 UTC. There is no evidence of an attack or malicious activity causing the issue.