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Cloudflare, a key internet infrastructure firm, apologized to its customers and the wider internet for a "significant outage" on Tuesday that impacted numerous high-profile websites, such as X and Chat. The company stated the disruption occurred when a configuration file meant for threat traffic failed to function as intended, "triggering a crash" in its core service traffic handling software. "We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today," it said in a statement.
"Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable," the company added.
It said while the issue had been resolved, some services might still encounter errors as they came back online.
Thousands of users began reporting issues with the sites, as well as other services, to outage monitoring site Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT.
A wide range of apps and websites were impacted by the outage. Users reported encountering delays or technical issues when trying to access services such as Grindr, Zoom and Canva.
Meanwhile social media platform X (formerly Twitter) was displaying a message on its homepage for some users which said there was a problem with its internal server due to an "error" originating with Cloudflare.
ChatGPT's site was also displaying an error message telling some users: "please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed.”
Cloudflare is a huge provider of internet security across the world, carrying out services such as checking visitor connections to sites coming from humans rather than bots. It says 20% of all websites worldwide use its services in some form.
The range of sites affected was demonstrated by the fact Downdetector itself - a site many flock to when sites stop loading or appear to have issues - also displayed an error message as many tried to access it on Tuesday.
Cloudflare has stressed the problem was the result of a technical problem.
"To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity," it said in its statement.
The company's share price was trading around 3% lower shortly after 15:00 GMT.
