What is Cloudflare that causes ChatGPT to crash and paralyze the Internet?
Cloudflare, one of the giant web infrastructure providers, is in the spotlight after causing massive outages for many major platforms around the world, including ChatGPT.
Cloudflare is one of the giant web infrastructure providers that allows websites to serve content to users. Like other big companies in this space, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare is often invisible to the average user, until something goes wrong.
Cloudflare describes itself as “one of the world’s largest networks” with “millions of internet properties.” The company’s website says:"Today, businesses, nonprofits, bloggers, and anyone with an internet presence can boast faster, more secure websites and apps thanks to Cloudflare."
Cloudflare server issues paralyze ChatGPT.
Cloudflare offers a number of products, but its most famous and central is a suite of technologies that ensure websites can stay online when they receive large amounts of traffic. This traffic can come from an unusually high number of visitors or an attack that is designed to take the site offline.
In the simplest structure of the Internet, computers request data from origin servers. However, simple servers can become overwhelmed by requests, causing them to slow down or crash completely. Cloudflare and similar companies act as an intermediary layer between users' computers and origin websites.
These internet infrastructure providers use more resilient data centers to deliver websites quickly and reliably.
The incident occurred on the evening of November 18 (Vietnam time) when many major websites in the world stopped loading normally. Visitors to ChatGPT or other websites instead of seeing content, saw a notification from Cloudflare itself.
The message said an error had occurred, the company's system was not operating properly, and the user should "try again in a few minutes."
Because Cloudflare provides tools for so many different websites, outages can quickly take down a wide range of seemingly unrelated sites. This is similar to what happened to another web infrastructure provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS), last month. In both cases, these companies are often invisible, but suddenly become more visible when they go down.
