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Online security company Cloudflare suffered a widespread global outage on Tuesday, forcing popular sites such as X and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to go offline for some users.
The San Francisco-based company said on its website it was investigating the issue, which it blamed on “internal service degradation”.
Cloudflare said some services were recovering but warned that customers might see “higher-than-normal error rates”.
The company said its network was also “offline” and that it was experiencing problems with its customer support site. It said it was working alongside its “third party provider to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem”.
The incident comes just a month after Amazon’s cloud business experienced a large outage, which hit a range of groups, including ride-hailing app Lyft, coffee chain Starbucks, Lloyds Bank and ChatGPT.
Cloudflare’s technology powers a significant part of the internet, with more than 20 per cent of all websites relying on its software, according to W3Techs.
Cloudflare said a “spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services” caused “traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors”.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic,” it said.
Shares in Cloudflare, which went public in 2019 and has a market value of $71bn, were down 3.5 per cent in pre-market trading on Tuesday.
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