Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure platform, experienced an outage that appeared to affect websites across the internet, including the social media platform X, on Tuesday, Nov. 18.

The company said in a statement to USA TODAY that its services "experienced a significant outage" beginning around 5:20 a.m. EST, but it was "fully resolved" at 9:30 a.m. EST.

"To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity. 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," the statement said.

Cloudflare added, "Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. We will learn from today's incident and improve."

Earlier in the morning, Cloudflare said in a statement to USA TODAY that it was "all hands on deck" to resolve traffic problems.

According to Downdetector, an outage-tracking website, thousands of users of several popular websites were reporting issues or outages by 8 a.m. EST, including X, Spotify, OpenAI, League of Legends and more. Downdetector itself also briefly appeared to be having connectivity issues tied to the Cloudflare outage.

Is Cloudflare still down?

Cloudflare said the outage was resolved as of 9:30 a.m. EST, and all services would return to normal over the subsequent several hours.

"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 in a statement.

More updates are available on its status website, and a detailed explanation will be posted on blog.cloudflare.com.

Cloudflare is a platform which many websites use to improve their performance and functionality.

Which websites are down from Cloudflare outage?

According to Downdetector, the following websites reported increased outages as of 9 a.m. EST:

  • Archive of Our Own
  • Canva
  • Canvas
  • Character AI
  • ChatGPT
  • Claude AI
  • Dayforce
  • Google Store
  • Grindr
  • Ikea
  • Indeed
  • League of Legends
  • Letterboxd
  • OpenAI
  • Quizlet
  • Rover
  • Spotify
  • Square
  • Truth Social
  • Uber
  • X, formerly Twitter
  • Zoom

Melina Khan is a national trending reporter for USA TODAY. She can be reached at melina.khan@usatoday.com.

This story has been updated with additional information and to fix a typo.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Is X down? Cloudflare outage impacts ChatGPT, Spotify, more websites

Reporting by Melina Khan, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect