Cloudflare outage: How AI helped this edtech company to get back online before some of the biggest websites

A recent Cloudflare outage disrupted hundreds of websites, including major ones such as X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, and more. The effects of the nearly six-hour blackout ended after the IT services company announced that the issue had been resolved and that users could access websites that rely on Cloudflare’s infrastructure. However, the US-based edtech company Coursera has claimed it was able to restore its services much earlier than major websites. The company’s co-founder, Andrew Ng, who has also served as the former head of Google Brain and Baidu AI Group, took to the social media platform X to reveal that Coursera restored its site well before the Cloudflare outage was resolved. According to Ng, the company’s engineers used AI coding to quickly deploy a clone of basic Cloudflare capabilities to run the company’s site.

In his X post, Ng wrote: “Really proud of the DeepLearningAI team. When Cloudflare went down, our engineers used AI coding to quickly implement a clone of basic Cloudflare capabilities to run our site on. So we came back up long before even major websites!”

How the Cloudflare outage affected internet users

The Cloudflare outage made many websites difficult or impossible to use. Users reported trouble loading posts on X, opening tools like Canva, using chatbots such as ChatGPT, or accessing games like League of Legends.In many cases, users saw a message saying, “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed,” which prevented them from reaching the site. This happened because Cloudflare’s security and challenge systems were not working correctly, even though the websites themselves were still running.Since Cloudflare handles content delivery and security for many internet services, problems on its network can affect a large number of websites at once. This outage caused several unrelated sites to go down simultaneously.Explaining the reason behind the outage, Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht wrote on X: “A latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation of our network and other services. This was not an attack.”Cloudflare provides DNS, CDN, and DDoS protection for several websites; which is why the outage triggered a chain of issues. Here’s a list of some of the major websites that were disrupted due to the outage