ChatGPT, Cloudflare and Google Cloud go down in global mega-outage
Humanity's digital civilisation falls briefly to its knees, before slowly standing up again to recover from yet another major global incident.
Much of the internet collapsed this afternoon following a giga-outage that wiped out ChatGPT, Cloudflare and a wide range of Google Cloud services.
Although Google has now fixed problems with a number of apps ranging from Gmail to Calendar, services from other providers remain unavailable.
It's believed that technical issues at Google Cloud may have caused the problems, which started at about 5pm ET.
On its status page, OpenAI wrote: "We are aware of issues affecting multiple external internet providers that are impacting the availability of our services such as single sign-on (SSO) and other log-in methods. Thank you for your continued patience."
It's the second time this week OpenAI has suffered an outage.
On its own status website, Cloudflare wrote: "Cloudflare’s critical Workers KV service went offline due to an outage of a 3rd party service that is a key dependency. As a result, certain Cloudflare products that rely on KV service to store and disseminate information are unavailable including:
Access
WARP
Browser Isolation
Browser Rendering
Durable Objects (SQLite backed Durable Objects only)
Workers KV
Realtime
Workers AI
Stream
Parts of the Cloudflare dashboard
Turnstile
AI Gateway
AutoRAG
"Cloudflare engineers are working to restore services immediately. We are aware of the deep impact this outage has caused and are working with all hands on deck to restore all services as quickly as possible."
Downdetector also reported that people were having difficulties accessing a range of other services including Spotify and Snapchat.
At the time of writing, both Google and OpenAI have resumed service as usual.
Do you have a story or insights to share? Get in touch and let us know.
