Internet users faced widespread frustration Tuesday as ChatGPT went offline for hours, with the root cause traced to a major outage at Cloudflare, the content delivery network that powers the popular AI chatbot and countless other services.
OpenAI confirmed the disruption on its status page, while Cloudflare reported problems with its global network starting early Tuesday. Downdetector showed massive spikes in reports for ChatGPT, Discord, Shopify and dozens of other platforms that rely on Cloudflare infrastructure.
Social media quickly lit up with jokes about the irony. One widely shared quip from Cloudflare engineers claimed they couldn’t figure out how to fix the issue because “we usually just ask ChatGPT.” Another viral post read: “ChatGPT is down because Cloudflare is down. Cloudflare engineers are stuck because ChatGPT is down. Perfect loop.”
The outage brought back memories of Elon Musk’s sharp criticism earlier this year when Amazon Web Services suffered a similar breakdown. At the time, Musk mocked companies for relying on third-party cloud providers, asking why major platforms didn’t host everything in-house. Many users were quick to point out that X (formerly Twitter) and Musk’s own Grok AI also run on Cloudflare infrastructure, prompting fresh rounds of online ribbing.
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“Experts still have job security,” one user wrote. “When everything breaks at once, only humans can fix it — even ChatGPT can’t save itself today.”
Cloudflare said teams were working urgently to restore service. By late afternoon, most affected sites, including ChatGPT, began coming back online.
