Cloudflare, whose network handles around a fifth of web traffic, said it started to investigate the internal service degradation around 6:40 a.m. ET.

It has deployed a fix but some customers might still be impacted as it recovers service.

The incident marked the latest hit to major online services.

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

Cloudflare, whose shares were down about 5% in premarket trading, 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.

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

Reports about issues with Cloudflare had, however, come down to about 600 by 8 a.m. ET from a peak of nearly 5,000, the outage-tracking tool showed.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources. Since the numbers are based on user-submitted reports, the actual number of affected users may vary.

“We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC.

That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors,“ the company said in an emailed statement.

“We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”

X and ChatGPT-creator OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

PTA monitors global outage

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) is closely monitoring the global service disruption affecting X (formerly Twitter) and Cloudflare, according to a spokesperson.

PTA is continuously reviewing the widespread outage impacting both platforms and remains in constant contact with international service providers and local operators.

Monitoring will continue until full restoration of services.