Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare experienced a major outage on Tuesday, causing several high-profile websites to go offline globally. Many sites, however, returned online within a few hours.

By 9:57 a.m. ET, Cloudflare updated its status page, confirming that a fix had been implemented, though some users might still experience issues accessing the company’s online dashboard. “We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” the company added.

Websites and platforms affected by the outage included Shopify, Indeed, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, Truth Social, Elon Musk’s X, and some NJ Transit digital services, according to Downdetector. OpenAI reported that ChatGPT and its Sora short-form video app had fully recovered after facing issues related to a “third-party service provider.”

A Cloudflare spokesperson said the outage was caused by an automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic, which “grew beyond an expected size of entries” and triggered a crash in the software system handling traffic. The company noticed a spike in unusual traffic around 5:20 a.m. ET.

The company emphasized that there is no evidence of an attack or malicious activity. “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,” the spokesperson said.

Cloudflare manages traffic for roughly 20% of the web, providing security services such as protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which occur when malicious actors flood a website with traffic to disrupt its functionality. The outage caused Cloudflare shares to fall more than 2%.

This disruption comes less than a month after Amazon Web Services experienced a daylong outage, followed by a global Microsoft Azure and 365 services disruption. In July 2024, a software upgrade by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike also caused a widespread outage affecting flights, financial services, and hospitals.