Major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT, were inaccessible for thousands of users globally for several hours on Tuesday as web-infrastructure firm Cloudflare was hit by an outage, disrupting internet services.

The outage also intermittently affected The Times of Israel, impeding ToI’s ability to upload and display photos.

The company said the outage that began around 6.30 a.m. ET was caused by an automatically generated configuration file, designed to manage potential security threats.

The file grew too large and crashed the software system handling traffic for several Cloudflare services, the company, whose network handles around a fifth of web traffic, said.

It initially said it deployed a fix but some customers might still be impacted as it recovered service. Cloudflare shares were down 2.3 percent in morning trading.

The incident prevented thousands of users from accessing platforms........

© The Times of Israel