Ah, the inevitable things in life: death, taxes, and eating crow on the internet.
Infrastructure service Cloudflare faced a major outage Tuesday morning, cutting off access to many popular platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, and Spotify. The outage also affected Elon Musk’s X, but just a month later, the CEO was gloating over widespread outages at AWS, including its encrypted messaging service Signal.
“X Chat messages are fully encrypted, with no ad hooks or weird ‘AWS dependencies,’ so even if someone held a gun to my head, I wouldn’t be able to read your messages,” Musk wrote about X. Since X is down, I can’t link his post directly.
Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal, used the outage as an opportunity to explain the harms of having so much of the internet running on just a few infrastructure services like CloudFlare and AWS.
“The question is not, ‘Why does Signal use AWS?’” she wrote in Bluesky. “It’s about looking at the infrastructure requirements for a global real-time mass communications platform and asking how we got to a situation where there are no viable alternatives to AWS or other hyperscalers.”
Cloudflare wrote on its status page that the issue has been identified and a fix has been implemented. At the time of publication, service has not yet been restored for all Cloudflare customers, but users may notice some platforms starting to come back online.
This story is unfolding…
