When a Cloudflare outage disrupted large numbers of websites and online services yesterday, the company initially thought it was hit by a “hyper-scale” DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack.

Cloudflare said on Tuesday morning that it was "all hands on deck" trying to work out the cause of the outage.

Cloudflare was hit by an outage that knocked several major websites and services offline for global users. OpenAI's ChatGPT, e-commerce platform Shopify and Elon Musk's social media platform X appear to have been affected by the Cloudflare issues.

Cloudflare experienced a "spike in unusual traffic” shortly before errors broke out across many major websites it serves, the internet infrastructure company told Newsweek. Read the full story here.

Web services company Cloudflare said it is aware of problems impacting "multiple customers" amid reports of outages at apps including X.

Investigating - Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers. Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.

Many popular internet services experienced slowdowns and outages Tuesday morning, with the major web infrastructure company Cloudflare saying a bug led to broad problems on its network.

Cloudflare stock closed the Nov. 18 trading session 2.83% lower at $196.53. The outage exacerbated the ongoing sell-off of the stock, and the closing price is 22.4% lower than the stock's peak closing price of $253.30 on October 31.