A Cloudflare outage caused large chunks of the Internet to go dark Tuesday morning, temporarily impacting big platforms like X and ChatGPT.

“A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” Cloudflare’s status page said. “Some customers may be still experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard.”

The company initially attributed the widespread outages to “an internal service degradation” and provided updates as it sought a fix over the past two hours.

A Cloudflare spokesperson told Ars that the cloud services provider saw “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services,” which “caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors.”

After the company investigated the “spike in unusual traffic,” Cloudflare’s spokesperson provided a more detailed update, telling Ars, “the root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services.”

“To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity,” the spokesperson said. “We expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post-incident, but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours”

About 20 percent of the web relies on Cloudflare to manage and protect traffic, a Cloudflare blog noted in July. Some intermediate fixes have been made, Cloudflare’s status page said. But as of this writing, many sites remain down. According to DownDetector, Amazon, Spotify, Zoom, Uber, and Azure also experienced outages.

“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” Cloudflare’s spokesperson said. “We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. We will learn from today’s incident and improve.”

Cloudflare will continue to update the status page as fixes come in, and a blog will be posted later today discussing the issue, the spokesperson told Ars.

It’s the latest massive outage site owners have coped with after an Amazon Web Services outage took out half the web last month. Both the AWS outage and the chaotic CrowdStrike outage last year were estimated to cost affected parties billions.

Critics have suggested that outages like these make it clear how fragile the Internet really is, especially when everyone relies on the same service providers. During the AWS outage, some sites considered diversifying service providers to avoid losing business during future outages.

The outage may have caused some investors to panic, as Cloudflare’s stock fell about 3 percent amid the widespread outage.

Ars will update this story when Cloudflare provides more information on the outage.

This story was updated on November 18 to add new information from Cloudflare.

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A Texas Judge has rejected a request from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to issue a temporary order barring Tylenol’s maker, Kenvue, from claiming amid litigation that the pain and fever medication is safe for pregnant women and children, according to court documents.

In records filed Friday, District Judge LeAnn Rafferty, in Panola County, also rejected Paxton’s unusual request to block Kenvue from distributing $400 million in dividends to shareholders later this month.

The denials are early losses for Paxton in a politically charged case that hinges on the unproven claim that Tylenol causes autism and other disorders—a claim first introduced by President Trump and his anti-vaccine health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In a bizarre press conference in September, Trump implored Americans repeatedly not to take the drug. But, scientific studies have not shown that Tylenol (acetaminophen) causes autism or other neurologic disorders. Some studies have claimed to find an association between Tylenol use and autism, but the studies have significant flaws, and others have found no link. Moreover, Tylenol is considered the safest pain and fever drug for use during pregnancy, and untreated pain and fevers in pregnancy are known to cause harms, including an increased risk of autism.

Still, Paxton filed the lawsuit October 28, claiming that Kenvue and Tylenol’s former parent company, Johnson & Johnson, deceptively marketed Tylenol as safe while knowing of an increased risk of autism and other disorders. The lawsuit sought to force Kenvue to change the way it markets Tylenol and pay fines, among other requests.

As a first step, the attorney general—who is running to unseat U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in next year’s Republican primary—attempted to get the judge to temporarily bar some of Tylenol’s safety claims and stop Kenvue from paying the dividends. He failed on both accounts.

Paxton made the request to stop the dividends under a state law that can keep companies on the brink of financial ruin from giving out funds that could otherwise be reserved for creditors, such as those suing the company over claims that Tylenol caused autism or other harms. Kenvue is facing a number of such lawsuits in the wake of Trump’s announcement. But, even the state’s lawyers acknowledged that Paxton’s request to block dividends was “extraordinary,” according to The Texas Tribune.

According to Reuters, one of Kenvue’s lawyers, Kim Bueno, explained that the problem with the state of Texas making this request is that Kenvue is based in New Jersey and incorporated in Delaware. “There was no jurisdiction to challenge that,” she said.

Rafferty determined that she did not have jurisdiction over the dividend claim. She also denied the marketing claim, which even the Trump administration is not standing by. The day after Paxton filed his lawsuit, Kennedy said that “the causative association… between Tylenol given in pregnancy and the perinatal periods is not sufficient to say it definitely causes autism.” Though, he called some studies “very suggestive.”

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Scientists have found traces of ancient opiates in the residue lining an Egyptian alabaster vase, indicating that opiate use was woven into the fabric of the culture. And the Egyptians didn’t just indulge occasionally: according to a paper published in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology, opiate use may have been a fixture of daily life.

In recent years, archaeologists have been applying the tools of pharmacology to excavated artifacts in collections around the world. As previously reported, there is ample evidence that humans in many cultures throughout history used various hallucinogenic substances in religious ceremonies or shamanic rituals. That includes not just ancient Egypt but also ancient Greek, Vedic, Maya, Inca, and Aztec cultures. The Urarina people who live in the Peruvian Amazon Basin still use a psychoactive brew called ayahuasca in their rituals, and Westerners seeking their own brand of enlightenment have also been known to participate.

For instance, in 2023, David Tanasi, of the University of South Florida, posted a preprint on his preliminary analysis of a ceremonial mug decorated with the head of Bes, a popular deity believed to confer protection on households, especially mothers and children. After collecting sample residues from the vessel, Tanasi applied various techniques—including proteomic and genetic analyses and synchrotron radiation-based Fourier-transform infrared microspectroscopy—to characterize the residues.

Tanasi found traces of Syrian rue, whose seeds are known to have hallucinogenic properties that can induce dream-like visions, per the authors, thanks to its production of the alkaloids harmine and harmaline. There were also traces of blue water lily, which contains a psychoactive alkaloid that acts as a sedative, as well as a fermented alcoholic concoction containing yeasts, wheat, sesame seeds, fruit (possibly grapes), honey, and, um, “human fluids”: possibly breast milk, oral or vaginal mucus, and blood. A follow-up 2024 study confirmed those results and also found traces of pine nuts or Mediterranean pine oil; licorice; tartaric acid salts that were likely part of the aforementioned alcoholic concoction; and traces of spider flowers known to have medicinal properties.

Vessels of alabaster

Now we can add opiates to the list of pharmacological substances used by the ancient Egyptians. The authors of this latest paper focused on one alabaster vase in particular, housed in the Yale Peabody Museum’s Babylonian Collection. The vase is intact—a rare find—and is inscribed in four ancient languages and mentions Xerxes I, who reigned over the Achaemenid Empire from 486 to 465 BCE. The authors were particularly intrigued by the presence of a dark-brown residue inside the vase.

Past scholars had speculated the vases most likely held cosmetics or perfumes, or perhaps hidden messages between the king and his officials. Yet there are also several known pharmacopeia recipes contained in such works as the Anicia Juliana Codex of De materia medica by Dioscorides. The current authors analyzed residue samples with nondestructive techniques, namely portable X-ray fluorescence XRF (pXRF) and passive Fourier Transform Infrared (pFTIR) spectroscopy.

The result: distinct traces of several biomarkers for opium, such as noscapine, hydrocotarnine, morphine, thebaine, and papaverine. That’s consistent with an earlier identification of opiate residues found in several Egyptian alabaster vessels and Cypriot juglets excavated from a merchant’s tomb south of Cairo, dating back to the New Kingdom (16th to 11th century BCE).

The authors think these twin findings warrant a reassessment of prior assumptions about Egyptian alabaster vessels, many of which they believe could also have traces of ancient opiates. A good starting point, they suggest, is a set of vessels excavated from Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 by archaeologist Howard Carter. Many of those vessels have the same sticky dark brown organic residues. There was an early attempt to chemically analyze those residues in 1933 by Albert Lucas, who simply didn’t have the necessary technology to identify the compounds, although he was able to determine that the residues were not unguents or perfumes. Nobody has attempted to analyze the residues since.

Additional evidence of the value of the residues lies in the fact that looters didn’t engage in the usual “smash and grab” practices employed to collect precious metals when it came to the alabaster vessels. Instead, looters transferred the organic stuff into portable bags; there are still finger marks inside many of the vessels, as well as remnants of the leather bags used to collect the organics.

“It remains imminently possible, if not probable, that at least some of the vast remaining bulk of calcite vessels… in fact contained opiates as part of a long-lived Egyptian tradition we are only beginning to understand,” the authors concluded. Looters missed a few of the vessels, which still contain their original organic contents, making them ideal candidates for future analysis.

“We now have found opiate chemical signatures that Egyptian alabaster vessels attached to elite societies in Mesopotamia and embedded in more ordinary cultural circumstances within ancient Egypt,” said co-author Andrew Koh of the Yale Peabody Museum. “It’s possible these vessels were easily recognizable cultural markers for opium use in ancient times, just as hookahs today are attached to shisha tobacco consumption. Analyzing the contents of the jars from King Tut’s tomb would further clarify the role of opium in these ancient societies.”

DOI: Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology, 2025. 10.5325/jeasmedarcherstu.13.3.0317  (About DOIs).

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Be careful with your marketing stunts around national landmarks. That should be the take-home message from Chery Automobile’s recent attempt to measure itself up against Land Rover, an attempt that went sadly wrong.

In 2018, Land Rover and Chinese racing driver Ho-Pin Tung drove a Range Rover Sport up the 999 steps that make up the “Stairway to Heaven” that climb China’s Tianmen mountain. It was a dazzling stunt, for driving up a staircase that ranges between 45–60 degrees is no simple task, and one that’s certain to have left an impression with any acrophobics out there.

Chery certainly remembered it. The brand—which in fact is a long-time collaborator with Jaguar Land Rover and next year even takes over the Freelander brand from the British marque—has a new electric SUV called the Fulwin X3L and decided that it, too, was made of the right stuff. The SUV, which costs between $16,500–$22,000 in China, features a plug-in hybrid powertrain, boxy looks, and a whole bunch of off-roading features, including the ability to do tank turns.

Like Land Rover, Chery’s attempt was meant to highlight how capable the Fulwin X3L is when the going gets tough. But unfortunately, one of the safety lines to the SUV somehow became detached. This tangled up with a wheel, causing the Fulwin to slide backwards, taking out some of the railing in the process.

Chery said in a statement that there had been “insufficient estimation of potential risks and oversights in detailed control” for the exercise, and expressed deep regret for the damage caused, promising to shoulder the costs to put everything right, according to CarNews China.

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On the occasion of Ken Burns’ new series on the American Revolution, National Security Journal asked me for some thoughts on how things could have gone wrong for the Continentals in the war…

American accounts of the Revolution focus on how scrappy bands of rebels managed to defeat Europe’s most powerful crown, and tend to de-emphasize the extraordinary difficulties of holding onto a vast, lightly populated territory with poor infrastructure.

The inhabited territory of the Thirteen Colonies amounted to more than 400000 square miles, some five times the size of Great Britain. The colonies claimed some 2.5 million inhabitants to eight million Britons, although over half a million of the former were enslaved.

Moreover, although Great Britain was wealthier in aggregate than the Colonies, per capita living standards were almost certainly higher in America, mainly because of the abundance of land.

The British government also faced immense difficulties in maintaining armies in the field and in communication across the breadth of the Atlantic.

This is not to say that the Patriots faced an easy task; the British Army and the Royal Navy were larger, better armed, and more experienced than their Colonial counterparts. The British maintained better relations with the Native American tribes that lived on the frontier, a particularly sore point with the colonists. Nevertheless, conquering the recalcitrant colonies would have been an immensely difficult military task even for a Crown undistracted by other problems.

The post To the Revolution! appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.