Cloudflare restores service and provides explanations after global outage blocked access to sites such as X and ChatGPT

Cloudflare announced that its services are now "operating normally." The U.S. online service provider suffered a technical incident that disrupted access to internet sites, such as Spotify, ChatGPT and X.

"At this point, it is considered safe to re-enable any Cloudflare services that were temporarily disabled during the incident," the company maintained in an update around 12 EST.

Although it was its latest notification about the incident for the time being, Cloudflare promised to provide the outcome of an investigation as soon as they can. Dane Knecht, the company's chief technical officer, assured that the outage had not been an attack, but a problem following a routine configuration change.

"I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader internet," Knecht maintained in a subsequent post on X. After apologizing and promising to provide more information about what happened, he promised to work to win back the trust of his customers: "The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most and we are going to do what it takes to earn that back."

During the incident, the Downdetector website recorded disruptions to services from Google, OpenAI and Amazon, as well as on the social network X, the League of Legends video game and the image editor Canva.

The outage is reminiscent of the one that occurred in October on Microsoft and Amazon's (AWS) cloud platforms, impacting online services for video games, retailers and shipping companies.