Another major Cloudfare outage has caused major international sites that use AI (artificial intelligence) to go down. Affected sites included ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), PayPal, Canva and more.
According to reports, the outage is “major” and worldwide.
Although the messages on the sites say things like “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed”, it’s best to ignore the message until Cloudfare has fixed the issues on its side. (This is really a case of it’s not you, it’s them!)
Some reports claim the outage has affected half the internet. According to CNBC, the figure may be closer to 20%.
While X is down, Meta’s sites (Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp) are still functioning normally. Microsoft’s Chatbot is also working. (This is a great growth opportunity for Microsoft’s Copilot, which uses almost the same AI models as ChatGPT but its own tech instead of Cloudflare.)
Any company that uses Cloudfare (which protects against cypberattacks and helps optimise traffic) will be affected.
Cloudflare is working to restore the service. It says it noticed a “spike in unusual traffic” on one of its servers before the errors began. A spokesperson said: “We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
At the time of publishing this article (15:10 on Tuesday 18 November 2025), only Canva had returned to normal service for us.
