Launch with a head start: fresh, verified, business-specific leads tailored to your niche.
Welcome to Flutebyte Technologies
On the morning of June 17, 2024, millions of people opened their browsers expecting everything to work as usual. Instead, they ran into strange error pages on ChatGPT, Discord, Shopify stores, news sites, and even betting platforms like Bet365. The messages looked different on each site, but the core problem was the same: Cloudflare, the company that quietly keeps a huge part of the internet safe and fast, was having a very bad day.
If you saw any of these messages, you probably felt confused or even a little worried:
Here’s the good news: you didn’t do anything wrong. Your computer is not infected, your IP address is not blacklisted forever, and you don’t need to “unblock” anything on your side. The problem was 100% on Cloudflare’s end, and they fixed it within a few hours (full service was restored by around 11:30 AM UTC).
But outages like this keep happening — this was the third major Cloudflare incident in just over a year — so it’s worth understanding what actually went wrong and how you can protect yourself (or your business) next time.
Cloudflare sits between visitors and the real web server of a website. Think of it as a very smart bouncer at a nightclub:
More than 20% of all websites use Cloudflare, including big names like:
When Cloudflare has a problem, all of those sites feel it at once.
Cloudflare posted an official update on their status page (status.cloudflare.com) at 07:38 UTC saying they were “investigating widespread issues with Cloudflare services”. By 09:15 UTC they identified the root cause: a bug in a recent code change that was pushed globally and affected three data centers at the same time.
In simple terms: someone at Cloudflare pushed new code that contained a mistake. Because of how their system works, that mistake spread instantly across the planet instead of staying in one region. Normal users started failing the “security checks” that Cloudflare runs in the background, so the system thought everyone was a bot and blocked them.
They rolled back the bad code and everything returned to normal by 11:30 UTC.
Source: Cloudflare official incident report – June 17, 2024
The messages are written to stop real attackers. When everything works normally, only bots and bad actors see them. On June 17, normal people saw them because Cloudflare itself was broken.
That’s why you got a message that said “you have been blocked” even though you were just trying to ask ChatGPT a simple question.
Cloudflare is usually very reliable, but big outages do happen:
These events are rare, but when they happen, the impact is massive because so many sites depend on one company.
Most important: do nothing drastic. Don’t factory reset your router, don’t pay anyone to “unblock your IP”, and don’t panic.
If you run a website or online store, here are practical steps you can take today:
The June 17 Cloudflare outage reminded everyone how much of the internet runs on just a handful of companies. When one of them trips, millions of people feel it within seconds.
The fix for regular users is simple: wait it out. The fix for business owners is a bit more work — but putting a few safeguards in place now means you won’t lose sales the next time something like this happens.
At FluteByte Technologies, we help online businesses stay up even when big providers fail. We offer multi-CDN setups, 24/7 monitoring, fallback pages, and fast DNS solutions that keep your site reachable no matter what.
Ready to make sure your website never shows a scary Cloudflare error again?
Drop us a message at https://flutebyte.com/contact or email hello@flutebyte.com and we’ll audit your current setup for free.
