Cloudfare has experienced an outage impacting various websites around the world, including social media platform X and OpenAI's ChatGPT.

On Tuesday morning, the internet infrastructure company said that it was investigating an issue which has impacted multiple customers, including widespread 500 errors.

The business also said that Cloudfare Dashboard, an internet-based control panel that provides a single page for managing all of the company’s products, security settings, and analytics, and API were "failing".

“We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem,” the company said. “More updates to follow shortly.”

The issues followed announcements of scheduled maintenance at data centres in Santiago, Tahiti, Los Angeles, and Atlanta.

The company also warned that its support portal provider was experiencing issues, meaning customers could encounter errors viewing or responding to support cases.

"We are working alongside our third party provider to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem," continued the business.

By the afternoon, Cloudfare said that while services were beginning to recover some customers might continue to experience "higher-than-normal error rates" as it continued remediation efforts.

Chris Dimitriadis, chief global strategy officer at IT governance professional association ISACA said that the outage is another stark warning of how interconnected and fragile the digital world has become following the CrowdStrike outage last year and recent disruption to the services of hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft Azure.

"Organisations are now at a crossroads," he continued. "Fixing this one incident will not prevent the next.

"We must act now to embed cyber resilience into the very fabric of our digital infrastructure. That means investing in education, training, and building a larger, better-equipped army of cybersecurity professionals who can envelope our supply chains in resilience."

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