A widespread outage at global internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare has disrupted access to several high-profile websites, including social media platform X and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with reports emerging of similar issues affecting some Ghanaian news sites.
Thousands of users worldwide, including in Ghana, began flagging problems on outage tracking platform Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT on Tuesday, leading to error messages and loading failures across multiple services.
Cloudflare, in a statement, attributed the disruption to “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC,” which triggered errors for traffic routed through its network.
On X’s homepage, affected users encountered a message indicating an internal server issue stemming from a Cloudflare-originated “error.”
Similarly, ChatGPT displayed prompts for users to “unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed,” while CitiNewsroom and other local sites showed intermittent loading errors, frustrating Ghanaian readers and online communities.
In an update on its service status dashboard, Cloudflare noted that the issues “potentially impact multiple customers” but added that “services are recovering,” though some may still experience elevated error rates during ongoing remediation.