Huge worldwide internet outage impacts major websites including X and Spotify as Cloudflare speaks out

Cloudflare has spoken out after a worldwide internet outage impacted major websites, including X and Spotify, on Tuesday.

Many booting up the internet this morning would have found some of their apps and websites were down, including X and popular music streaming site Spotify.

Ironically, even DownDetector was among the fallen, so you couldn't even check if the issue was just your internet having played up, or the rest of the world too.

It appears to be an issue with the network and delivery service Cloudflare, which, according to its website, 'powers internet requests for millions of websites and serves 81 million HTTP requests per second on average'.

The company said of today's (November 18) outage: "Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers.

"Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available."

Cloudflare has issued a statement (Getty Stock Photo)

A spokesperson said the company observed a 'spike in unusual traffic', adding: "We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic.

"We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors."

While some websites remain down at the time of writing, Cloudflare has said it was 'continuing to work on restoring service' in a recent update provided on their website.

CNBC reports Cloudflare manages and secures traffic for roughly 20 percent of the entire web, so it's hardly surprising that their servers being down today has caused some widespread disruption.

As a result of the recent outage, shares of Cloudflare slid by more than 5 percent in premarket trading on Tuesday.

The likes of OpenAI (which includes ChatGPT), Coinbase, Archive of our own, Authy (a two-factor authentication platform), Canva, Letterboxd, Sage, Perplexity AI and IKEA have been experiencing issues.

X has been down today (Cheng Xin/Getty Images)

Meanwhile, Quora, Discord, Grindr, League of Legends, and Google Gemini have also reported issues earlier in the day.

What is Cloudflare?

I think today's events will have seen many come across Cloudflare for the first time, but it's actually an integral part of the internet that helps you go about your daily browsing.

To put it simply, Cloudflare is a web infrastructure provider which hosts numerous websites for users.

The New York Times states that Cloudflare is responsible for helping sites fight off cyber attacks, while also helping websites load effectively.

It comes just weeks after an Amazon Web Services outage took more than 1,000 websites and apps offline.