Some of the world’s most popular digital destinations like ChatGPT, Spotify, X as well as New York-area transit sites, were down Tuesday amid an outage with infrastructure platform Cloudflare.
The company announced “scheduled maintenance” early Tuesday in Atlanta and Tahiti, but by 10 a.m. ET, acknowledged, “Some customers may be still experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard,” which they were “working on a fix to resolve … and continuing to monitor.”
It wasn’t just the social media-adjacent sites suffering, as tri-state area transportation like MTA, Metro North, the Long Island Railroad and NJ Transit were reportedly affected.
MTA spokesperson Aaron Donovan told The Daily News that neither its app nor internal systems were affected, though service alerts on the MTA site were.
At the time of publication, NJ Transit’s site led to a 404 site error, and an alert that its “digital services … may be temporarily unavailable or slow to load” thanks to “a vendor firewall-related issue.”
At about 10 a.m. ET, Cloudflare said there was ongoing “scheduled maintenance” in Sydney, and that they were “continuing to investigate this issue” with the support portal as “customers might encounter errors viewing or responding to support cases.
“We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem,” continued Cloudflare. They did not seem to address the impact on any of the specific sites or apps, which also includes LGBTQ dating app Grindr.
“Our teams are monitoring the situation closely and will restore full functionality as soon as Cloudflare implements a fix. We appreciate your patience and apologize for inconvenience,” concluded NJ Transit.
Under a section for updates pertaining to “Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues,” the company said it was “experiencing an internal service degradation,” due to which “some services may be intermittently impacted.” Cloudflare said it was investigating and had ultimately “identified” the problem and was working on rectifying it.
Around 11 a.m. ET, Cloudflare said it was “mitigating several issues” with the Cloudflare dashboard and that bot scores — which assign a numerical score to the likelihood “that request came from a bot” — “will be impacted intermittently while we undergo global recovery.”
Just last month, Amazon Web Services experienced an outage that upended the likes of Reddit, Snapchat and Venmo.