Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Major Platforms Including X, ChatGPT and DownDetector

A massive Cloudflare outage on Monday disrupted access to several major global platforms, including X, ChatGPT, and even outage-tracking service DownDetector, causing widespread connectivity issues for users worldwide.Cloudflare, a key provider of DDoS protection and internet content delivery services, confirmed it was working urgently to restore its systems after users attempting to access various sites encountered error messages such as “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”DownDetector itself briefly went offline before partially recovering. According to Cloudflare’s latest update at 8:58AM ET on its status page, the company is “continuing working on restoring service for application services customers.”Cloudflare spokesperson Jackie Dutton said the company detected a “spike in unusual traffic” around 6:20AM ET, which led to errors for some traffic passing through its network.We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors,” Dutton ...

• 18 Nov 2025