What Is Cloudflare, And Why Did Its Outage Take Down X, ChatGPT, And Parts Of The Web?

Cloudflare’s services are used by nearly 20% of all websites on the internet.

An outage at Cloudflare Inc. (NET) on Tuesday disrupted several parts of the internet, including social media platform X as well as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, among others.

“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers,” the company said in a status update earlier on Tuesday.

A little later, the company said it was seeing a recovery in services as it undertook remediation efforts.

Earlier on Tuesday, service tracking monitor Downdetector showed a massive spike in OpenAI outage reports, with users complaining that ChatGPT was either completely down or that its responses were slow.

Cloudflare shares were down by more than 3% in Tuesday’s pre-market trade. Retail sentiment on Stocktwits around the company trended in the ‘bearish’ territory at the time of writing.

However, why was an outage at a service provider like Cloudflare so disruptive? To answer that question, it is essential to understand precisely what Cloudflare is.

What Is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is a U.S.-based company that offers content delivery services, cybersecurity, and mitigation of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, among other things.

“Cloudflare helps connect and protect millions of customers globally. Everyone from individuals to the world’s largest enterprises use our unified platform of networking, security, and developer services,” the company says on its website.

Who Uses Cloudflare?

According to the company, Cloudflare services are used by nearly 20% of the websites on the internet. It says that its threat and network intelligence technology is built into every connection and that it is not tied to any one cloud provider, which makes websites resilient against threats and downtimes.

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