Why ChatGPT and X went down: Explaining the Cloudflare outage
An internet outage on November 18 temporarily disrupted major services including AI chatbot ChatGPT and social network X, and showed how heavily dependent online platforms are on a small number of infrastructure providers.
Cloudflare, the US company behind the disruption, said a hidden software bug triggered problems after a routine network update.
The issue caused unusual traffic spikes and affected multiple websites and apps worldwide. Downtime was reported by users of X, Google services, and the video game League of Legends. Even the Global South World site, run by Gjirafa Tech, was not spared from the outage.
Cloudflare, which handles roughly one-fifth of global internet traffic, saw its stock fall 1.5% following the disruption.
“Earlier today, we failed our customers and the broader internet when a problem in Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us,” said Cloudflare’s chief technology officer Dane Knecht.
Experts said the outage exposed the risks of centralised internet infrastructure.
Cloudflare supports about a third of the world’s top websites, including AI platforms like OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as online retailers.
Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey said relying on a few major providers creates efficiency, but failures can have wide-ranging consequences.
Analysts also point to growing strain on digital networks. Jacob Bourne from Emarketer said rising demand from AI applications, streaming, and general web traffic is pushing systems beyond their limits, making outages more frequent and harder to resolve.
The company promised a detailed explanation of the incident and steps to prevent future problems, emphasising the critical role of infrastructure in keeping global internet services running smoothly.
This story is written and edited by the Global South World team, you can contact us here.
