After hours of outage on Tuesday, cybersecurity company Cloudflare Inc. 's global network service outage has been resolved. The outage temporarily paralyzed many websites, including major U.S. energy regulators, ChatGPT, the New Jersey Department of Transportation and social media platform X. As of 10 a.m. New York time, services such as ChatGPT and X have returned to normal.
A Cloudflare spokesperson said the company noticed an "unusual traffic surge" on a service around 6:20 a.m. ET, which caused errors in some data transmitted through its network. According to the company, the issue was fixed within six hours.
Cloudflare spokesperson Jackie Dutton said in a statement that the outage stemmed from an automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic. The statement said there is currently no evidence of a cyberattack or malicious activity.
"The file had a larger than expected number of entries, causing a crash in the software system handling traffic for multiple Cloudflare services," Dutton explained.
The company has suffered multiple service outages over the past few years.
In July 2019, Cloudflare's software vulnerability caused some network modules to excessively consume the company's computing resources, causing problems including Discord, Shopify Inc. Thousands of websites around the world, including , SoundCloud and Coinbase, were offline for up to 30 minutes. In June 2022, Cloudflare suffered a service outage, which affected the traffic of its 19 data centers and basically paralyzed its main websites and services. The incident lasted for about an hour and a half.
A large number of enterprises around the world use Cloudflare's software, which forms a buffer layer between the enterprise website and end users, protecting the website from traffic overload attacks.