Cloudflare Says Highly Disruptive Outage Not Caused by Attack

Cloudflare says a highly disruptive outage affecting services such as ChatGPT, X, Dropbox, Shopify and the game League of Legends was not caused by a cyberattack. Outages were reported across websites and digital services linked to critical organisations including New Jersey Transit, New York City Emergency Management, and SNCF.

Cloudflare initially noted a “spike in unusual traffic”, but according to Cloudflare, the issue was not an attack; a latent bug in a service underpinning its bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change. The company began investigating at 11:48 UTC and announced a fix at 14:42 UTC, with some errors persisting about two hours later. Cloudflare’s status page is expected to yield a detailed explanation of why the incident occurred.