• Company restores services; says no evidence of cyberattack
• Fault traced to auto-generated security file that crashed traffic software
• Canva, X, ChatGPT among services widely inaccessible

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

The company, which 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, later said it had fully restored its services.

It said the outage that began around 6.30am 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.

The company said it has started to investigate and has deployed a fix, but some customers might still be impacted as it recovers service globally. Its shares were down 2.3 per cent in morning trading.

Cloudflare said there was “no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity”.

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

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

NetBlocks, a global internet monitor working at the intersection of digital rights, cybersecurity and internet governance, said in a post on X that “a wide range of online services are currently experiencing disruptions due to a technical issue affecting Cloudflare’s global network”, stressing that the incident was not related to country-level internet shutdowns or filtering.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) also acknowledged the impact of the global disruption on local users.

The regulator said it was “closely monitoring a major global outage impacting X (Twitter) and Cloudflare. PTA is in contact with global platforms and local operators and will continue to observe the situation until services are fully restored”.

On its X account, Cloudflare initially said it was “aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers”, promising further details as more information became available.

At about 7:45pm Pakistan time, roughly two hours after the problems began to ease, the company posted: “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”

On its website, the company said, “Our vast global network, which is one of the fastest on the planet, is trusted by millions of web properties. With direct connections to nearly every service provider and cloud provider, the Cloudflare network can reach about 95pc of the world’s population within approximately 50 milliseconds.”

Published in Dawn, November 19th, 2025