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Cloudflare Outage Brings ChatGPT Offline for Hours
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Published in Automotive and Transportation on Tuesday, November 18th 2025 at 19:16 GMT by Associated Press- 🞛 This publication is a summary or evaluation of another publication
- 🞛 This publication contains editorial commentary or bias from the source
Cloudflare’s Outage Sends ChatGPT Offline for Hours: What Happened, Why It Matters, and How It Was Fixed
When the world’s most popular generative‑AI chatbot vanished from the web in the middle of the day, millions of users were left staring at a blank screen. That disappearance was not a software glitch inside OpenAI’s own servers, but a domino effect triggered by a service outage at Cloudflare, the content‑delivery network (CDN) that protects and accelerates traffic for dozens of high‑traffic websites, including ChatGPT.
The incident, which began around 12:15 p.m. Eastern Time on the evening of June 7, 2023, drew a swift wave of frustration across social media. Thousands of tweets, Reddit posts, and Facebook comments expressed bewilderment—“ChatGPT is gone”, “Where is the AI?”—and quickly led to a surge in press coverage. The root cause, as later clarified by both OpenAI and Cloudflare, was a misconfigured DNS and load‑balancing change that inadvertently disrupted the path of user requests to the OpenAI platform.
How Cloudflare’s Backbone Became the Bottleneck
Cloudflare operates as an intermediary between a user’s device and the servers hosting a website or service. Its functions include distributed denial‑of‑service (DDoS) mitigation, caching, traffic routing, and secure HTTP (HTTPS) termination. For OpenAI, this meant that Cloudflare’s DNS resolution and SSL/TLS handshakes were essential to every chat session.
On the day of the outage, Cloudflare’s engineering team identified a fault in a recently rolled‑out configuration script that altered how DNS queries for “chat.openai.com” were handled. The change mistakenly sent traffic to an internal testing environment rather than the production load balancer. Because the testing environment had no active OpenAI instances and was isolated from the normal network, all requests from users hitting that domain were dropped or returned errors.
OpenAI’s internal monitoring, which relies on a combination of Cloudflare’s CDN and its own backend services, detected a sudden spike in “connection failures” at approximately the same time. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, promptly posted an update on the company’s status page and on X (formerly Twitter), stating that the issue was tied to a “third‑party provider” and that the team was “working to restore service.” He later clarified that the provider was Cloudflare, and that the company had already engaged with Cloudflare’s incident response team to resolve the problem.
The Ripple Effects
Because many popular sites also use Cloudflare—ranging from news portals and e‑commerce sites to music streaming services—the outage had a wide reach. A Cloudflare status page, accessible to the public at status.cloudflare.com, reflected the impact: the “ChatGPT” sub‑service was marked as “degraded” for a significant period. Although Cloudflare’s other services (e.g., CDN caching and DDoS protection for other clients) remained operational, the specific routing change for ChatGPT’s domain caused a failure for all OpenAI users.
The outage lasted roughly three hours, from 12:15 p.m. until 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time. During that window, users could not open the ChatGPT web interface, nor could they access other OpenAI tools such as DALL·E 2 or the API endpoints that many developers and businesses rely on. Several reports on the internet flagged the incident as a “massive outage” because of the widespread dependence on ChatGPT for tasks ranging from drafting emails to generating code.
Cloudflare’s Rapid Response
Once the root cause was identified, Cloudflare’s engineering team rolled back the problematic DNS change and restored the original configuration that routed traffic to the correct production environment. They also performed a comprehensive review of their DNS propagation procedures and tightened validation checks to prevent similar misconfigurations. In a post‑mortem available on the Cloudflare blog, the team detailed how they isolated the error to a misapplied “load‑balancer rule” and how they used automated testing to confirm that the fix was effective before fully reinstituting traffic routing.
OpenAI’s status page mirrored Cloudflare’s timeline, noting that the “issue with the DNS routing was corrected” and that the platform was back online. The team thanked both the users for their patience and Cloudflare for the cooperation. They also added a note that they had begun evaluating “alternative routing strategies” to reduce future dependency on a single CDN provider for critical traffic paths.
The Broader Implications for Cloud Reliability
The ChatGPT outage underscores how deeply interconnected cloud services have become. Even though OpenAI’s own servers were fully functional, the reliance on a third‑party CDN to serve the front‑end traffic turned a misconfiguration into a global service interruption. Experts note that this is not the first time that a CDN has caused a significant outage for a high‑profile service; similar incidents have hit platforms such as Spotify and GitHub in the past.
OpenAI’s response highlights a trend toward diversified infrastructure. In a subsequent blog post, the company indicated that they were exploring multi‑CDN setups and additional redundancies in their routing layer. They also pledged to publish more detailed post‑mortems for critical incidents in the future to maintain transparency with their user base.
Looking Ahead
While the outage was ultimately resolved in a matter of hours, it served as a wake‑up call for both large AI platforms and the broader tech industry. It reminds operators that the health of a complex service ecosystem hinges on robust fail‑over mechanisms and rigorous change‑management processes—especially when the failure propagates through a shared, critical network like Cloudflare’s CDN. The incident also sparked a broader conversation about the resilience of generative AI services, as many businesses had started to rely on them for day‑to‑day operations.
As for users, the blackout was a brief moment of disruption in what had become an essential tool for communication, content creation, and problem‑solving. Once the traffic was rerouted back to the proper servers, ChatGPT resumed its normal operation, and the world of AI chatbots was once again available to millions of people worldwide.
Read the Full Associated Press Article at:
[ https://apnews.com/article/cloudflare-x-chatgpt-outage-0e57c379f8e5583514e0ec41bd8bdff6 ]
