A significant outage at Cloudflare disrupted access to various major websites on Tuesday morning, affecting platforms like X and ChatGPT. The company reported that a fix had been implemented, but some users were still facing issues logging into the Cloudflare dashboard. Initially, Cloudflare attributed the problem to "internal service degradation" but later clarified that an unusual spike in traffic was at the root of the issue. The spokesperson revealed that the outage stemmed from a configuration file designed to manage threat traffic. This file exceeded its expected size, leading to a crash in the software that manages traffic for multiple Cloudflare services. Importantly, there were no indications that the outage resulted from a cyberattack or any malicious activity. Following the incident, Cloudflare anticipated some lingering service degradation as traffic levels normalized but expected full restoration within a few hours.