X, Spotify and ChatGPT among sites down after outage at network firm Cloudflare

Websites including X and Spotify have been hit by a major outage linked to Cloudflare (Alamy/PA)

Websites including X and Spotify have been hit by a major outage linked to Cloudflare.

Thousands of users reported issues with a host of different websites, including the film review site Letterboxd, which were impacted by technical issues at the internet network services business.

ChatGPT, multiplayer games such as League of Legends and the Scottish Parliament website have also all been impacted.

The DownDetector monitoring site, which was itself hit by the outage, showed a flurry of reported issues after 11am on Tuesday.

More than 10,000 DownDetector users reported issues related to Cloudflare.

A number of the websites affected, including X, came back online temporarily before suffering further problems.

Users saw a message on a number of the websites saying the issues were caused by an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network”.

Cloudflare provides network and security services for many online businesses in order to help their websites and applications operate.

The company said in a server update that it was “experiencing an internal service degradation” and that some service may be intermittently affected.

It added: “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.” 

Cloudflare, which runs services such as checking that visitors to websites are humans rather than bots, says around a fifth of all global websites use some of its services.

Cloudflare had scheduled maintenance for the SCL (Santiago) data centre for Tuesday.