Cloudflare Big Problem

Cloudflare is a company that helps many websites work fast and safe.
On Tuesday, something went wrong inside their system.

Many big websites like X (Twitter), ChatGPT, and Canva stopped working for almost five hours.
People only saw a message saying “Error 500”.

CEO Explains What Happened

Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, said sorry for the trouble and explained the mistake.

He said that the problem did not happen because of hackers.
It happened because of a small mistake inside their own computer system.

What Went Wrong?

One of Cloudflare’s computer files became too big by mistake.
This big file confused many computers and made them stop working.

The file kept getting made again every five minutes.
Some computers had the new version, and some had the old version.
Because of this, sometimes things worked, and sometimes they didn’t.

They First Thought It Was an Attack

At first, the Cloudflare team thought someone was attacking their website like Hackers.
But later, they saw it was just a broken file causing the trouble.

How They Fixed It

They stopped the bad file from spreading, used a good old file, and restarted their systems.
By 8:00 PM (IST), most things were working normally again.

Many Cloudflare Tools Stopped Working

Because of the problem:

• Many websites showed error messages

• A tool called Turnstile did not load

• Some systems that store information had problems

• Some people could not log in

• Email spam check didn’t work properly

This Should Not Happen Again

The CEO said this kind of mistake is not okay, and they will build stronger systems so it doesn’t happen again.