If ChatGPT is down for you right now, you’re not alone — major Cloudflare outage affecting OpenAI

Happy Tuesday! Unless you’re with a service currently down due to the large Cloudflare outage, enjoy your day.

When issues arise like this, fixing them quickly becomes essential, but it also creates frustration for people who use services like ChatGPT.

If you’re having trouble accessing ChatGPT right now, you might be seeing a message asking you to unblock a website called ‘challenges.cloudflare.com’. This isn’t a problem with your account – it’s an issue with Cloudflare, a service that many websites use, and it’s affecting ChatGPT.

Copilot has entered the chat.

Microsoft’s chatbot, powered by OpenAI’s GPT technology, continues to function normally. It seems to be protected from recent issues because it uses Microsoft’s own infrastructure instead of Cloudflare.

Cloudflare helps websites load faster and stay secure by delivering content efficiently, blocking cyberattacks like DDoS, managing DNS, and optimizing traffic. When Cloudflare experiences an outage, all of these services become unavailable for any website that relies on it.

Is there anything you can do

There’s no easy fix for this problem. It’s happening on the servers that power these services, so we’re unable to resolve it on our end.

ChatGPT isn’t the only one experiencing problems. This morning, I also noticed issues with PayPal and X – PayPal even messed up my lunch order!

If ChatGPT is down and you need an alternative AI chatbot, Microsoft Copilot is a good option. It’s powered by similar AI technology and currently doesn’t use Cloudflare, which can sometimes cause issues.

Cloudflare is currently addressing the problem. While some services are starting to recover, many people are still experiencing issues. X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT appear to be significantly impacted, with users around the globe unable to access their main feeds.

Cloudflare, while keeping customers informed with its status page (which briefly experienced an outage itself!), reports that restoring service is a matter of waiting. For updates specifically about ChatGPT, the best source is OpenAI’s own status page.

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2025-11-18 16:39