Cloudflare has fully restored its services after an outage on Tuesday prevented millions of people from accessing major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT.

The company said the outage that began around 1.30pm SAST 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 impacted 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.

Last month, an outage at Amazon’s cloud service caused global turmoil as thousands of popular websites and apps, including Snapchat and Reddit, were inaccessible due to the disruption.

Unusual traffic

The latest outage at Cloudflare prevented millions of users from accessing platforms such as Canva, X and ChatGPT, prompting users to log outage reports with Downdetector.

Read: Cloudflare meltdown knocks major websites offline

“We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services… That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors,” the company said earlier in the day. — Jaspreet Singh, (c) 2025 Reuters

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