A major Cloudflare outage has caused chaos across the internet, hitting popular services like X (formerly Twitter), Canva, Discord, and many others.
Many users are running into a confusing message: “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”
The only real fix is for Cloudflare to fully restore its services.
A major Cloudflare outage has caused chaos across the internet, hitting popular services like X (formerly Twitter), Canva, Discord, and many others. As users try to open these sites, many are running into a confusing message: “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.” For most people, this is blaffing. They haven’t changed any browser settings, installed new extensions, or blocked any websites. So why are they suddenly being asked to unblock something called challenges.cloudflare.com? Keep reading for all the details.
SurveyWhat is challenges.cloudflare.com?
To make sure visitors are real people and not harmful bots, Cloudflare uses a verification system. This system often shows up as a checkbox or a quick test asking you to confirm that you’re human. The domain challenges.cloudflare.com is where this human-check system lives. It’s part of Cloudflare’s “Turnstile” technology, which quietly runs in the background on many websites. Under normal conditions, you rarely notice it.
Usually, you’ll only see an error about this domain if you use a strong ad-blocker, have a privacy extension like uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger, or your DNS or security tools are blocking some scripts or domains. In those cases, your browser really is blocking the verification script.
Also read: Cloudflare down: What caused X, Perplexity, Canva and other major platforms to crash
Why you’re seeing the error today
During the current outage, something different is happening. Cloudflare’s own servers are having problems and are returning 500 errors (internal server errors). That means your browser is trying to reach challenges.cloudflare.com, but Cloudflare can’t respond properly. The website then assumes the script has been blocked by you, even though the real issue is on Cloudflare’s side. As a result, you see the misleading message telling you to “unblock” the domain.
Can you fix it?
In most cases right now, there’s nothing wrong with your browser. Turning off ad-blockers, clearing cookies, or changing DNS settings probably won’t help because the root cause is Cloudflare’s infrastructure failure.
The only real fix is for Cloudflare to fully restore its services. Until then, some sites may remain slow, broken, or stuck on that confusing error screen.
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Ayushi Jain
Ayushi works as Chief Copy Editor at Digit, covering everything from breaking tech news to in-depth smartphone reviews. Prior to Digit, she was part of the editorial team at IANS. View Full Profile
