Cloudflare down latest: Websites such as Twitter not working amid technical problems with the internet

Parts of the web appear to have stopped working amid a technical problem at Cloudflare. Visitors to websites such as X, formerly known as Twitter, ChatGPT and film reviewing site Letterboxd saw an error message that indicated that Cloudflare problems meant that the page could not show. Cloudflare is an internet infrastructure that offers many of the core technologies that power today’s online experiences.

That includes tools that protect websites from cyber attacks and ensure that they stay online amid heavy traffic, for instance. “Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers,” the company said in a new update. “Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”

Latest updates 2:02PM Blackout follows devastating Amazon crash Today’s Cloudflare glitch comes just weeks after problems at Amazon prompted the world’s biggest ever internet blackout. More than 3,900 companies were affected by a crash at Amazon Web Services and over 16 million people logged connection problems during the blackout on October 20.

A computer error at Amazon’s vast data centres on the US East Coast caused chaos during the outage last month, rendering sites and apps such as Lloyds Bank, HMRC and Snapchat unusable. 1:26PM Downdetector down: site for tracking internet blackouts offline A website widely used to track internet outages has been knocked out of action by the latest Cloudflare blackout. Downdetector, a service that monitors problems across the web, is widely used to check on the status of websites. However, the popular service was also hit by today’s Cloudflare issues, with its site only intermitently available and struggling to load.

1:09PM ‘Services are recovering’, says Cloudflare Cloudflare has issued an update saying its services have begun to recover from today’s blackout: “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.” However, it added that some users may continue to see issues, including in the UK, as it seeks to solve the problem. “During our attempts to remediate, we have disabled WARP access in London.  Users in London trying to access the Internet via WARP will see a failure to connect.” WARP is a tool from Cloudflare that includes additional privacy protections.

12:56PM What is Cloudflare? Most people outside of the IT world or technology journalism have probably never heard of Cloudflare, but the IT infrastructure company provides services that help keep swathes of the internet running smoothly. Cloudflare provides a variety of tools that help keep websites running properly, even if they are being hit with a spike in traffic or experiencing a cyber attack. It operates a “content delivery network” that helps streamline how websites load for users.

These systems help websites cope with high user numbers by spreading the burden of delivering images, videos and app content across a network of servers. It also provides cyber security services, such as protection from so-called “distributed denial of service” attacks that are intended to overload websites with spam traffic. Its tools form a key backbone for many websites. But when problems hit Cloudflare’s own systems, they can spread quickly across the web.