Major Internet Outage Hits Websites and Apps Across Ireland (including our own!)
Our mobile app remains down at this time as a result of this outage.
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A significant technology failure this morning is causing popular websites and apps to stop working for users across Cork and Ireland, with social media platform X, ChatGPT, and even some online games affected by the disruption.
The problem began shortly before noon Irish time when Cloudflare, a major internet infrastructure company that helps protect and speed up millions of websites, experienced widespread technical failures. The outage has left many everyday services temporarily unavailable or displaying error messages, including our own Cork Safety Alerts app.
Users attempting to access affected websites are seeing messages stating "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed", though they have not actually done anything wrong. The security systems Cloudflare provides to protect websites are currently not functioning, even though the websites themselves remain operational in the background.
The impact has been felt across a wide range of online services. X, formerly known as Twitter, has been significantly affected, with many users unable to load posts or use the platform. ChatGPT, the popular artificial intelligence service, is currently blocking access due to the Cloudflare issues.
Online gaming has also been disrupted, with players of League of Legends and Valorant reporting connection problems. Design platform Canva is experiencing difficulties, whilst some users have reported intermittent issues with PayPal and Uber Eats, particularly affecting payments and order processing.
Cloudflare acknowledged the problem at 11:48 UTC (GMT), stating on their status page:
"Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing."
The company provided an update at 12:03 GMT confirming they were continuing to investigate the issue. As of 12:21 GMT, the latest update stated: "We are continuing to investigate this issue."
For context, Cloudflare provides essential internet infrastructure services to an estimated 20 per cent of all websites globally. When their systems experience problems, the knock-on effects are felt across vast swathes of the internet, affecting everything from social media to shopping sites to entertainment platforms.
The company has not yet revealed the root cause of the outage, though scheduled maintenance was planned at one of their data centres in Santiago, Chile, around the time the problems began.
Users experiencing difficulties accessing their usual websites and apps should be aware this is a widespread technical issue rather than a problem with their own internet connection or devices. Normal service is expected to resume once Cloudflare resolves the underlying technical problems.
