A Cloudlfare Outage Has Affected Some of the Biggest Websites on the Internet

Although the infrastructure of the internet is not usually visible, there are moments when everyday users become aware of the things that support the websites they regularly visit. Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure platform, is experiencing outages across a variety of websites that it supports.

These outages have led some users to encounter an error message that says "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed." Naturally, many people want to know what that error message means, and whether there's anything they can do about it. Here's what we know.

While the error message "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed" might make it seem like there's something wrong with your machine, the reality is that this error message has been caused by an outage at Cloudflare and should resolve on its own without you taking any action. Cloudflare said it was aware of an issue that was affecting multiple customers and was already in the process of investigating it.

Cloudflare also explained that the issue stemmed from "a spike in unusual traffic" to one of its services, although it's unclear what might have caused that spike.

"That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare's network to experience errors. We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic," the company said.

The outage is affecting websites including X (formerly known as Twitter), ChatGPT, and Indeed, among many others. According to Cloudflare's status website, they are still working on a fix for the issue, which is why so much web traffic is facing errors at the moment. It's worth noting, though, that these errors are specific to certain sites, and other parts of the internet should be fine.

Given the size of Cloudflare and the number of websites it supports, these issues appear to be affecting people all over the globe. It's unclear right now whether the issues were caused by an error or whether Cloudflare experienced some sort of malicious attack that led to the outage. This is an important reminder, though, that the convenience of the internet is fragile, and it relies on a lot of systems working as they should.

Unless you work in backend support for a website, there's a decent chance you had never even heard of Cloudflare until it stopped you from visiting a website that you usually go to regularly. The internet is designed to make much of its own infrastructure invisible, but when it doesn't work, you become painfully aware of it.

Hopefully the issues that Cloudflare is facing will be resolved soon. Until then, though, you can learn more about the most recent status of their work on the company's status page.