A major Cloudflare outage recently caused widespread disruptions across the internet, affecting hundreds of platforms for nearly six hours. Several popular services such as X, ChatGPT, Spotify and others became difficult or completely inaccessible for users during the blackout. While most websites remained down until Cloudflare resolved the issue, US based edtech company Coursera managed to return online much sooner.
Coursera co founder Andrew Ng shared on X that the company’s engineering team used AI driven coding to deploy a quick clone of basic Cloudflare functions. This temporary setup allowed Coursera to restore its platform well before the outage was officially fixed. Ng who has also led the Google Brain and Baidu AI Group highlighted how this rapid use of AI tools helped the company bypass the disruption.
During the outage many users struggled to load posts on X or open platforms like Canva and could not access chatbots including ChatGPT. Some also reported issues with games such as League of Legends. A common message displayed on affected sites read “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed” which prevented users from accessing services even though the websites themselves were still functioning.
The disruption occurred because Cloudflare’s security and challenge systems malfunctioned. Since the company handles major functions like content delivery security and DNS services for a large number of websites any problem in its network can impact many platforms at once.
Explaining the cause of the breakdown Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht wrote on X that “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 of our network and other services. This was not an attack.” Cloudflare’s role in providing CDN DNS and DDoS protection meant the issue triggered failures across multiple unrelated websites.
Some of the major platforms affected during the outage included X Spotify Canva Shopify OpenAI Garmin Claude Verizon Discord TMobile AT&T and League of Legends.
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