ChatGPT and X among sites disrupted in worldwide Cloudflare outage

Cloudflare has fully restored its services after an outage on Tuesday at the web-infrastructure company prevented thousands from accessing major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT.

The company said the outage that began around 6.30am was caused by an automatically generated configuration file, designed to manage potential security threats.

The file grew too large and crashed the software system handling traffic for several Cloudflare services, the company, whose network handles around a fifth of web traffic, said.

The company said it has started to investigate and has deployed a fix but some customers might still be affected as it recovers service globally.

Cloudflare said there was “no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity”.

It runs one of the world’s largest networks that helps websites and apps load faster and stay online by protecting them from traffic surges and cyberattacks.