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‘What did we ever do before the internet?’ is a question many of us have jokingly asked. Well, this afternoon, we’re finding out firsthand. Content delivery network provider Cloudflare is down, meaning users across the globe are unable to access popular social platforms like X and Spotify, as well as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

 

Meanwhile, players on online games such as League of Legends and Valorant have also encountered difficulties.

 

According to Downdetector (which, rather ironically, ran into a few problems itself earlier), the system crashed shortly before lunch time on Tuesday November 18. Most people are being met with an error message reading ‘Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed’

 

When the system first went down, Cloudflare posted: "Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing.

 

"We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly."

 

Later on, the company shared: "We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts. We are continuing to investigate this issue."

 

Within the last couple of hours, Cloudflare said it had identified the issue but didn’t give an exact time for when everything would be back up and running:

 

"We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover," Cloudflare wrote in a status update.

 

"Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates".

 

Image: Freepik