Zoom, X, ChatGPT, PayPal are DOWN: Cloudflare leaves parts of the internet offline in major outage

Zoom, X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, PayPal, and more are down as Cloudflare suffers an outage.

Cloudflare is a global network that helps websites run quickly and safely. It acts as a protective shield between visitors and websites, blocking cyberattacks and speeding up page loading times.

Recognising the outage, the company said in a statement: “We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly. Cloudflare is aware of and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers. Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available."

The outage began at 11:48am this morning and has since been facing intermittent issues.

Generic messages such as "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed" have crept up across major platforms. If you see this, you don't need to take any action as Cloudflare is working to restore service.

This message also demonstrates that while Cloudflare isn't working quite right, the websites they're supposed to protect remain live in the background.

Errors pop up across affected platforms as Cloudflare works to restore service

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Other internal service error pages have also popped up when you try to access platforms such as X.

Even Downdetector, the website known for detecting major outages online, has suffered from the outage. While it seems to have already recovered, ChatGPT, X, PayPal, Zoom, and others still aren't back online yet.

At the time of writing, Down Detector lists the following websites and services with vast outages:

• X (formerly Twitter)
• OpenAI
• ChatGPT
• Spotify
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Uber
• Canva
• Zoom

Cloudflare experiences outages relatively infrequently, given its scale. The last outage to occur was in November 2023.