Content delivery network (CDN) and internet services business Cloudflare suffered a global outage today, lasting more than three hours.

The company said that a "spike in unusual traffic" was behind the widespread issues, but added it was yet to understand what the root cause of that traffic was.

Cloudflare's outage took down a number of services, including ChatGPT, X, Bet365, Grindr, and League of Legends.

SDxCentral and sister site DCD were also, regrettably, brought offline.

Around 20% of websites globally are thought to use Cloudflare services in some form.

“Many of Cloudflare's services experienced a significant outage today beginning around 11:20 UTC. It was fully resolved at 14:30 UTC. The root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare's services,” Cloudflare told SDxCentral in a statement.

“To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity. We expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post incident but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours. A detailed explanation will be posted soon on blog.cloudflare.com. Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. We will learn from today's incident and improve.”