Cloudflare Bot Management System Outage Temporarily Disrupts ChatGPT and Other Major Websites
By
Richard Lawler
A second-rack bagel that's nearly first-rack. Tasty stuff.
Summary
Cloudflare experienced a major outage on Tuesday that temporarily took down numerous websites and services including ChatGPT, X, and Downdetector. The outage was caused by a failure in Cloudflare's Bot Management system, which is designed to handle traffic spikes and DDoS attacks. The incident lasted several hours and affected about 20% of the web that runs through Cloudflare's network, resembling recent outages from other major cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledCloudflare said last year that about 20 percent of the web runs through its network
today's crash disconnected many of them, knocking out everything from X to ChatGPT to the well-known outage tracker Downdetector for several hours
Cloudflare's bot controls are supposed to help deal with problems like crawlers scraping information to train generative AI
Cloudflare's Bot Management system crashed Tuesday, and took down many sites and services that relied on the CDN feature
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