Several websites, including social media platform X, appear to have been affected by issues affecting internet infrastructure company Cloudflare.
Thousands of users reported problems with X and other services to outage monitoring site Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT on Tuesday.
“Cloudflare is aware of and investigating an issue potentially affecting multiple customers,” the company said in a note on its service status dashboard at 11:48 UTC.
“More details will be provided as more information becomes available.”
In a later update, the company said it was “seeing services recover,” but added that customers “may continue to see higher than normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
This suggests that some platforms may continue to experience issues as the company works to resolve the technical issues it has encountered.
Cloudflare is a large internet security provider worldwide, offering services such as verifying that visitors’ connections to sites come from humans rather than robots.
It says that 20% of all websites in the world use its services in some way.
It is unclear which and how many of those websites have been affected by this outage, and to what extent.
However, some users have also reported issues affecting other high-profile platforms, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.
OpenAI says it is investigating those issues, but has not explicitly said whether they are related to Cloudflare.
The issues affecting Cloudflare services come after an outage affecting Amazon Web Services last month left more than 1,000 sites and apps offline.
Shortly after, another major web services provider, Microsoft Azure, was also affected.
Some experts suggest that such incidents highlight the fragility of the modern Internet and the deep disruption that problems can cause in the small number of companies that support it.
