The issue caused unusual traffic spikes and affected multiple websites and apps worldwide. Downtime was reported by users of X, Google services, and the video game League of Legends. Even the Global South World site, run by Gjirafa Tech, was not spared from the outage. 

Cloudflare, which handles roughly one-fifth of global internet traffic, saw its stock fall 1.5% following the disruption.

“Earlier today, we failed our customers and the broader internet when a problem in Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us,” said Cloudflare’s chief technology officer Dane Knecht.

Experts said the outage exposed the risks of centralised internet infrastructure . 

Cloudflare supports about a third of the world ’s top websites, including AI platforms like OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as online retailers. 

Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey said relying on a few major providers creates efficiency, but failures can have wide-ranging consequences.

Analysts also point to growing strain on digital networks. Jacob Bourne from Emarketer said rising demand from AI applications, streaming, and general web traffic is pushing systems beyond their limits, making outages more frequent and harder to resolve.

The company promised a detailed explanation of the incident and steps to prevent future problems, emphasising the critical role of infrastructure in keeping global internet services running smoothly.

In a post on X on Tuesday, October 14, Altman said the change will follow the rollout of stricter age verification measures, which will ensure users are over 18 before accessing adult or explicit material. The company has not yet detailed how the verification process will work.

The move marks a significant change for OpenAI, which tightened ChatGPT’s restrictions earlier this year after concerns about how the chatbot responded to users in mental distress. Those changes, Altman said, had made the service “less useful or enjoyable” for users without mental health challenges.

He added that OpenAI has since developed new tools to mitigate mental health risks and can now “safely relax restrictions in most cases.”

“If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it (but only if you want it),” Altman said.

OpenAI says the changes are designed to balance creative freedom with safety, particularly as the company continues to expand its user base.

The company launched a dedicated version of ChatGPT for minors in September, which automatically blocks explicit material and redirects underage users to age-appropriate content.

The stricter content policies earlier this year followed controversy after the death of Adam Raine, a California teenager whose family alleged in a lawsuit that ChatGPT had given him harmful advice before he took his own life.

Altman said OpenAI learned from that experience and aims to maintain strong safeguards while restoring some of the flexibility users had lost.