ChatGPT Outage After Cloudflare Service Disruption

ChatGPT went offline for many users at once after a widespread Cloudflare incident knocked many big online services offline. OpenAI recognized the problem and said it was caused by a third-party provider—but Cloudflare admitted that it is still trying to restore any affected application services. There were early reports that the ChatGPT iOS app still works for some—the impact appears to be mostly on the web side.

What Users Are Seeing During the ChatGPT Outage

Those trying to sign in to the ChatGPT website report failed logons, looping security checks, and occasional 5xx errors. In a few cases, the page gives instructions about Cloudflare’s challenge domain, which works as an entryway for many sites to fend off bots and malicious traffic. When that challenge layer is broken, valid sessions can fail before they ever make it to the app.

Third-party tracking services such as Downdetector reflect a sharp increase in reports of outages for ChatGPT and a number of other platforms, all suggestive of a shared infrastructure provider running into trouble.

What OpenAI and Cloudflare Have Said So Far

A status page for OpenAI reports an “active incident” related to an external provider and says engineers are working on a fix. Cloudflare, which runs one of the world’s largest content delivery networks and security services, has admitted a flaw that leaks users’ web traffic across the internet. Cloudflare says the problem is with some of its old equipment and it is being fixed.

Put simply, it’s the case that traffic destined for ChatGPT’s web app is hitting the edge of Cloudflare and failing there, rather than within OpenAI’s systems themselves. That would fit with why the mobile app, which could take a different route or use different authentication flows, seems to be more resilient.

Who Else Is Affected by the Cloudflare Outage

Cloudflare sits in front of a large chunk of the web—including DNS, security, caching, and traffic acceleration. If a core Cloudflare service goes haywire, several high-traffic properties could stutter at the same time. In addition to ChatGPT, users have also experienced outages affecting the likes of X, Grindr, Canva, Spotify, and YouTube—demonstrating just how wide-ranging collective dependence on the internet can be.

We’ve seen this pattern before. Previous Cloudflare incidents, and outages at other hyperscale providers, briefly took large parts of the internet offline, highlighting how dependent modern apps have become on just a handful of backbone platforms.

How a Cloudflare Problem Can Break ChatGPT

Most of the time, large web apps run behind a reverse proxy and a web application firewall to mitigate threats, absorb spikes in traffic, or deliver assets from around the world. When that edge layer is degraded, browsers can no longer finish the opening handshake and requests never arrive at the app’s origin servers. ChatGPT’s streaming replies can end mid-discussion, leading to timeouts and partial answers.

Enterprise networks and browser extensions could make the pain worse. Some security tools and ad blockers get in the way of challenge domains, and that’s almost always a client-side fix. That said, today’s symptoms suggest a provider-side failure rather than user configuration.

What You Can Do Right Now to Access ChatGPT

If the web interface doesn’t work, try the iOS app. Some users say they have uninterrupted access there. If you’re already signed in on desktop, don’t sign out or clear cookies; re-authentication is a good way to hit failing services during the outage window.

For a real-time status page, consult the official sites of OpenAI and Cloudflare. To be sure, switching browsers or disabling some aggressive extensions can help in ordinary situations, but if the edge network is to blame you won’t be able to mend things locally. Beware lookalike sites or “workarounds” that ask for your credentials.

How Long Will It Last and When to Expect Recovery

Cloudflare has indicated active remediation. Traditionally, such incidents may be resolved within hours, but timelines depend on the scale and subsystem involved. Since the failure seems to be right at the edge, after recovery many of these sites could come back online all at once as the fix propagates.

The Bigger Picture of Shared Internet Dependencies

The episode is notable as a reminder that a handful of infrastructure providers support an extremely large share of digital services. Focusing DNS, CDN, and security at internet scale is efficient and performant, but it also leaves us with correlated risk. For developers and IT staff, this argues for redundancy across providers wherever possible, graceful fallbacks in clients when the back end fails, and clear user messaging when upstream services are unavailable.

For those just trying to use their computers every day, the takeaway is easier: It’s not you. Watch for communication from official channels, rely on the mobile app if it’s working, and expect service to return as upstream fixes are deployed.