American multinational web infrastructure and cybersecurity firm Cloudflare has seen a global failure that has taken several websites, such as social network X, Canva, and ChatGPT out of business.
Cloudflare said at 12:48 (Spanish peninsular time) that it is aware of the problems it is causing to its customers, including many of the world’s largest digital companies, and that it is “investigating the incident.”
According to the specialized page Downdetector, which records incidents online, the problems began to appear around 12:30 pm, although the peak occurred around 1:00 pm. The situation improved little by little, and at 13:15, many affected sites started working normally, until problems appeared later.
“We see services recovering, but customers may continue to experience more errors than usual as we continue to work to resolve the situation,” the company said in a statement at 1:20 p.m.
The problems affect several sectors equally. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools are failing en masse. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, was one of the first, but Claude (from Anthropic), Perplexity, or China’s DeepSeek, also backed out. Gemini, from Google, and Copilot, from Microsoft, are among the few companies that have continued to operate normally.
The social network league of legends Grindr quotes app is some of the sites that have reported operation problems. The problem also extended to banking services, including Kaisha Bank.
Internet column
Cloudflare is a specialized cloud computing company that acts as an intermediary between content providers and websites. Specifically, it has a large Content Distribution Network (CDN for English abbreviations), which makes it available to those who want to offer its services online. The American company serves millions of pages from all over the world, so that the error in its systems is immediately transmitted to many sites across the Internet.
The Cloudflare systems failure occurs a month after the systems failure of AWS, the computing arm of Amazon’s cloud. Both incidents took many services online with them and showed how weak the global Internet infrastructure is, which depends on the good performance of a few companies.
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