Cloudflare, the network-and-security services firm underpinning a vast swath of global websites (in fact, they handle a third of global traffic), experienced a significant outage on 18 November that disrupted access for numerous major platforms.

According to reports, the issue began in the early hours of the US morning and continued into UK business hours before being declared resolved.

The company said that a fix had been implemented and that service was stabilising, although monitoring continued for residual errors.

Users of platforms including X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Zoom and the dashboard of DownDetector were among those impacted.

According to the Financial Times the root cause was not a cyber-attack but rather “an overly large configuration file used to manage threat traffic, which triggered a crash in Cloudflare’s software systems”

Cloudflare said that the disruption began when it observed a “spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services” starting at around 11.20am.

By around 3pm, Cloudflare declared the incident resolved, though it noted some could still experience dashboard login issues or larger-than-normal error rates.