Parts of the internet went down again on Tuesday.
A network issue at web security business Cloudflare disrupted internet services and took down sites such as ChatGPT and X for many users for around three hours on Tuesday morning.
A Cloudflare spokesperson told Business Insider that the company first saw "unusual traffic" to one of its services at 6:20 a.m. ET, with a status update on its website around 30 minutes later saying it was experiencing "internal service degradation."
The outage continued until around 9:30 a.m. ET, Cloudflare said in a later statement.
After initially saying it did not know what had led to the "spike in unusual traffic," Cloudflare said that the 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," it added.
"I won't mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader internet," Dane Knecht, Cloudflare's CTO, said in an X post.
'No evidence' of a cyberattack
Cloudflare said after the end of the outage that there was "no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity." The company added that it would soon share a detailed explanation of what went wrong on its blog.
"Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable," the company's statement said. "We will learn from today's incident and improve."
Business Insider found that during the outage, some affected sites were sporadically back online, only to stop working shortly afterward.
As of 11:45 a.m. ET, Business Insider was able to access X, ChatGPT, and other online services previously affected by the outage, such as Spotify, as well as Downdetector, a site that tracks website outages — which was also down for periods on Tuesday morning.
Cloudflare provides technology to help protect websites against hackers and fake traffic, and to make web pages faster. It is used by millions of websites globally, which means when it goes down, it affects a big portion of the internet.
The outage came around the same time as scheduled maintenance was taking place at data centers in several locations, including Atlanta and Los Angeles, according to Cloudflare's status page.
X, OpenAI, and Spotify could not immediately be reached for comment.
The disruption follows a major outage at Amazon Web Services last month, which impacted many online services, including Snapchat, Venmo, and Reddit.
A similar incident occurred in June, which affected major sites and cloud platforms, including Google Cloud, Cloudflare, and Amazon Twitch.
Internet outages are becoming a frequent issue for users, as the vast majority of websites rely on a handful of content delivery networks.
"We're seeing outages happen more frequently, and they're taking longer to fix," said Jacob Bourne, an analyst at EMARKETER.
"That's a symptom of strained infrastructure: increased AI load, streaming demand, and aging capacity all pushing systems past the edge."
EMARKETER is owned by Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company.
