Some things in life are unavoidable: death, taxes, and having to admit you were wrong online.
On Tuesday morning, Cloudflare, a major infrastructure provider, experienced significant outages that disrupted access to several well-known services, including ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify, and more. The disruption also affected Elon Musk’s X, coming just a month after the CEO had mocked a major AWS outage that impacted the encrypted messaging app Signal.
“All X chat messages are end-to-end encrypted, with no ad tracking or odd ‘AWS dependencies,’ so even under extreme duress, I couldn’t access your messages,” Musk posted on X. We’re unable to provide a direct link to his post because X is currently unavailable.
Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, used the incident to highlight the risks of having so much of the internet dependent on a handful of infrastructure giants like Cloudflare and AWS.
“The real question isn’t ‘why does Signal rely on AWS?’” she posted on Bluesky. “It’s about examining what it takes to run a global, real-time communications platform, and questioning how we ended up in a situation where AWS and other hyperscalers are the only viable options.”
Cloudflare updated its status page to say that the root cause had been found and a solution was being rolled out. At the time of writing, not all Cloudflare users have their service back, but some platforms are beginning to recover.
This story is still unfolding…
