Internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare hit by outage

A number of websites, including social media platform X, appear to have been hit by problems affecting internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare.

Thousands of users reported issues with X and other services to outage monitoring site Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT on Tuesday.

"Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers," the company said in a note on its service status dashboard at 11:48 UTC.

"Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available."

Cloudflare is a huge provider of internet security across the world, carrying out services such as checking visitor connections to sites are coming from humans rather than bots.

It says 20% of all websites worldwide use its services in some form.

It is unclear which and how many of those websites have been affected by this outage, and to what extent.

However some users have also been reporting problems affecting other high-profile platforms, including OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT.

OpenAI says it is investigating those issues but has not said explicitly that they are related to Cloudflare.

Issues affecting Cloudflare's services come after an outage impacting Amazon Web Services last month saw more than 1,000 sites and apps knocked offline.

Another major web services provider, Microsoft Azure, was also affected shortly afterwards.

Some experts suggest such incidents highlight the fragility of the modern internet, and the profound disruption that can be caused by problems at the small number of companies underpinning it.