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A widely used Internet infrastructure company said it has resolved an issue that led to outages impacting users of everything from ChatGPT and the online game League of Legends to the social media platform X on Tuesday.
Cloudflare, a content delivery network that provides network and security products to internet service providers, said on its status page that its engineers no longer saw some of the issues plaguing its customers but that they were continuing to monitor for any further problems.
The issues began on Tuesday morning. By 9:42 a.m. ET, the company said 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 chief technology officer, Dane Knecht, wrote in a post on X that the company failed its customers and "the broader internet" but said the issue didn't stem from a cyberattack.
Some users might still be experiencing issues using Cloudflare services, the company said after deploying the fix. Earlier on Tuesday, there were widespread reports of so-called 500 errors, as well as Cloudflare Dashboard and API failing.
The outage seemingly prevented thousands of users from accessing such platforms as Canva, Grindr, Spotify, Coinbase and Moody's credit rating services — the latter of which displayed an Error Code 500 on its homepage and instructed individuals to visit Cloudflare's website for more information.
New Jersey Transit said parts of its digital services may be temporarily unavailable or slow to load, and New York City Emergency Management said there are reports that city services were being impacted by the outage.
In France, the website of national railway company SNCF has been affected. The company warned customers that "some information and schedules may not be available or up to date. Our teams are working to restore these services as quickly as possible."
Cloudflare, based in San Francisco, works behind the scenes to make the internet faster and safer, but when problems flare up, "it results in massive digital gridlock" for internet users, cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple said.
While most people think there's a direct line between their digital device and a website, what actually happens is that companies like Cloudflare sit in the middle of those connections, he said.
Cloudflare is a "content delivery network" that takes content from 20 per cent of the world's websites and mirrors them on thousands of servers worldwide, said Chapple, an information technology professor at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business.
"When you access a website protected by Cloudflare, your computer doesn't connect directly to that site," Chapple said.
"Instead, it connects to the nearest Cloudflare server, which might be very close to your home. That protects the website from a flood of traffic, and it provides you with a faster response. It's a win-win for everyone, until it fails, and 20 per cent of the internet goes down at the same time."
Some cybersecurity experts have warned for years about the potentially ugly consequences of allowing a handful of big tech companies to underpin the online world's infrastructure.
Last month, Microsoft had to deploy a fix to address an outage of its Azure cloud portal that left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft and other services. The tech company wrote on its Azure status page that a configuration change to its Azure infrastructure caused the outage.
And Amazon experienced a massive outage of its cloud computing service in October. The company resolved the issue, but the outage took down a broad range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms.
CBC News reached out to Cloudflare for a statement. A spokesperson said the company saw a spike in "unusual traffic" to one of Cloudflare's services on Tuesday morning and that it will post an in-depth analysis detailing what happened at a later time.