At the time of this writing (a little after 8 a.m. Eastern Time), a large number of websites and apps are either completely offline or are experiencing significant issues, thanks to an issue with the popular Cloudflare infrastructure network provider. Cloudflare’s CDN powers several website and the infrastructure behind several high-profile apps.
The outage appear to be affecting the social network formerly known as Twitter (X), as users are unable to publish new posts or see refreshed timelines. The issue appears to be affecting X users around the globe. We can confirm it is still having issues, as we were unable to post about a previous article.
Cloudflare told 9to5Mac that it is investigating an issue which is causing error code 500 server outages, and confirmed the problem is impacting “multiple customers.” So far, the issue has been ongoing for more than an hour.
Some users are seeing a web page that reads “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed,” while others report seeing the more standard error code 500 messages. When we attempted to visit the DownDetector website to get a look at how many sites were down, we saw the “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed” message. (DownDetector does use Cloudflare.) Meanwhile, a visit to our friends at AppleInsider resulted in seeing a code 500 error.
There’s not much any of us can do right now than to make another cup of coffee or tea and wait for the issue to be resolved.
Just last month, we saw a similar outage, with several websites going down due to an Amazon Web Services problem.
Both last month’s and today’s outages underscores the problems that can occur when several popular websites and apps are all dependent on the same service.
