A critical internet infrastructure company, Cloudflare, successfully resolved a widespread outage that impacted numerous online services globally, including ChatGPT, League of Legends, X, Shopify, and various transit systems.
Cloudflare, a widely used Internet infrastructure company, announced it has resolved an issue that led to extensive outages impacting users of diverse services such as ChatGPT, the online game “League of Legends,” and the New Jersey Transit system early Tuesday. By 12:44 p.m. EST, Cloudflare confirmed that its engineers no longer observed the primary issues, though monitoring continued for any further problems. The disruption affected a broad range of platforms including social media site X, Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, and Moody’s credit ratings service. New Jersey Transit reported temporary unavailability or slow loading for parts of its digital services, and New York City Emergency Management noted impacts on city services. France's national railway company, SNCF, also saw its website affected. Cloudflare, based in San Francisco, functions as a 'content delivery network' (CDN), mirroring content from 20% of the world’s websites to enhance speed and security. Cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple explained that when Cloudflare experiences problems, it results in 'massive digital gridlock' because it sits in the middle of internet connections. This incident follows recent major outages for Microsoft's Azure cloud portal last month and Amazon's cloud computing service in October.
