Cloudflare, a company that helps websites manage internet traffic is experiencing issues with its global network, impacting major sites, and causing tech chaos at Australian airports.

“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers,” the company said on Tuesday.

“We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem.”

Outages were first confirmed by the company at 10.50pm AEDT.

Cloudflare provides tools to help websites against cyberattacks and load content. It handles traffic for roughly one-fifth of the entire internet.

Services experiencing outages include X, Spotify, Amazon and OpenAI, according to DownDetector – an online outage tracker.

Airport websites for Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide were also impacted.

The disruption has drawn comparisons to the CrowdStrike outage earlier this year when a software update crashed millions of Windows systems worldwide.

Cloudflare is still working to “understand the full impact and mitigate the problem”, with updates expected as the network stabilises.