A disruption in Cloudflare's services caused the disruption of key websites including the X platform, formerly Twitter, ChatGPT and other global services for nearly three hours, causing widespread disruption on the internet and bringing to the fore concerns of increased reliance on centralized internet services.

The company said in a statement that the bug was caused by an automatically generated configuration file to manage malicious traffic, explaining that this file swelled to a larger size than expected, causing the software system responsible for processing part of the traffic via Cloudflare's services to crash.

During the outage, users around the world observed an intermittent return to some sites before they stopped again, as regular updates appeared on Cloudflare's Services Status page indicating an internal deterioration in one of the systems.

Cloudflare is an American company specializing in internet infrastructure services, which provides website acceleration services and protection from cyberattacks such as DDoS, as well as DNS services and network monitoring tools, to ensure the speed, stability, and security of websites.