Updated: November 18, 2025, 10:21am EST As of 10:18 a.m. ET, OpenAI reported that its services had been restored. The latest message on its status page reads: “All affected services are now fully recovered. A detailed root cause analysis (RCA) will be published in the next 5 business days.” You can read our original story on the outage below.
Many users attempting to log in to the ChatGPT website this morning received an error message: “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”
On DownDetector, hundreds of users were similarly reporting problems, which began at 6:30 a.m. ET and then increased significantly throughout the morning. (Disclosure: DownDetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the parent company of Mashable.)
Cloudflare outage list: X, OpenAI, Canva, Spotify, more affected
And at 7:12 a.m. ET, OpenAI confirmed on a status page that it was investigating an issue with some of its websites. A later update on the OpenAI website read, “We have confirmed that this incident is caused by an issue with one of our third-party service providers. We will provide updates as they become available.”
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This issue is related to the ongoing Cloudflare outage. ChatGPT is one of several affected services, which also includes Xx, Grindr, Canva, Spotify, and YouTube. When a problem occurs in a major cloud computing platform like AWS or Cloudflare, it can have an impact on the entire World Wide Web.
However, we have some good news for ChatGPT users. The AI chatbot’s iOS app appears to be functioning normally at the time of writing. It is the ChatGPT website in particular that appears to be plagued with problems.
It’s too early to say what caused the Cloudflare outage. Cloudflare’s latest update said the cloud services platform was “working on restoring service to Application Service customers.”
This is a developing story…
Disclosure: Mashable’s parent company Ziff Davis filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in the training and operation of its AI systems.