Cloudflare outage disrupts NJ Transit, ChatGPT, X, other internet services
There were reports of widespread 500 errors as well as Cloudflare Dashboard and API failing.
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A widely used Internet infrastructure company said that it has resolved an issue that led to outages impacting users of everything from ChatGPT and the online game, "League of Legends," to the New Jersey Transit system early Tuesday.
Around 10 a.m. ET, Cloudflare said it was "continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal."
Others platforms that experienced outages Tuesday included the social media site X, Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, and the Moody's credit ratings service. Moody's website displayed an Error Code 500 and instructed individuals to visit Cloudflare's website for more information.
New Jersey Transit said parts of its digital services including njtransit.com, may be temporarily unavailable or slow to load.
Cloudflare, based in The San Francisco, provides internet infrastructure that protects websites from online threats and helps them run more smoothly.
“We are using virtual servers, virtual hosting and that's by all these infrastructure players and when there is a major outage it not just affects that application hundreds or thousands get affected simultaneously,” said Ian Marlow, a New Jersey native who specializes in cybersecurity and founder of FiTech Consultants.
Marlow says it’s a cycle. With more apps on cloud services, more services will require infrastructure upgrades.
“The higher the adoption rate the more people on the infrastructure the more people on the infrastructure the more you stress it and then it goes down and you need to add more infrastructure – we keep going on the curve and the curve goes up and drops,” said Marlow.
Marlow says a simple work-around is to ditch your app, and plug in the website on your phone’s browser during times of outages.
“Sometimes the app is down but the website is not so try to be old school if the app is down,” he explained.
Last month Microsoft had to deploy a fix to address an outage of their Azure cloud portal that left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft and other services. The tech company wrote on its Azure status page that a configuration change to its Azure infrastructure caused the outage.
And Amazon experienced a massive outage of its cloud computing service in October. The company resolved the issue, but the outage took down a broad range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms.
