People across the world are receiving strange messages on their computers. And it is all to do with Cloudflare, the web infrastructure company that powers much of the internet.
When people tried to talk to ChatGPT on Tuesday morning, for instance, they were not greeted by the usual overly friendly chatbot. Instead, they saw a short error message: “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed”.
:: Follow our latest coverage of the outage here.
Many of the world’s biggest websites – including, for instance, Donald Trump’s own Truth Social – included their own version of the message. But they gave little explanation of what unblocking “challenges.cloudflare.com” actually meant.
Users trying to visit betting website Bet365 saw an even more concerning message. “Attention needed!” it read. “Sorry, you have been blocked.”
An explanation underneath told users that the “action you just performed triggered the security solution” and that the block had gone into effect to protect the web page.
Though the error messages all suggest that visitors to the website can either take a step to fix the problem, or indeed might have already done something to cause it, that is not true. There is nothing that any normal person can do to resolve the issue.
That is because the problems are in fact the result of the issues at Cloudflare. The company has acknowledged that it is suffering major technical issues that have left its key products offline.
Those products protect many of the world’s most popular websites, and usually do so invisibly. When they break, however, the problems can very quickly become very widespread, as they did on Tuesday.
When those products are working, they ensure that websites are not overrun by large amounts of traffic or other security dangers. That is the reason for the slightly threatening language in some of the error messages: if Cloudflare is functioning as it should, then they should only show to people who are using the internet in a suspect way.
As they are down, however, they are showing up to normal users who have not done anything wrong. And those users can do nothing but simply wait for the services to come back online – as well as following along with The Independent’s ongoing coverage of the outage, which can be found here.
