Internet users trying to utilize websites such as X or ChatGPT had difficulty using numerous outlets Tuesday morning.
Cloudflare reported an outage Tuesday, causing dozens of major websites to provide an error message. It took several hours before service was restored.
The company said there was no evidence of malicious activity.
"Many of Cloudflare's services experienced a significant outage today beginning around 10:20 UTC. It was fully resolved at 14:30 UTC. The root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare's services," the company said.
When internet users go to a company's website, instead of going directly to the site's servers, Cloudflare filters users to check for malicious requests. This is done to prevent large-scale attacks. The company also caches content in order for sites to load faster.
The company said it apologized to customers and internet users for "letting you down."
"We expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post incident but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours," Cloudflare said late Tuesday morning.