Jakarta, CNN Indonesia --

Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare has spoken out after experiencing an outage on Tuesday (November 18th). The outage affected several sites, including X and the e-commerce platform Shopify.

The status page of OpenAI, the parent company behind ChatGPT, also indicates that their app and Sora were impacted by"an issue with one of our third-party service providers."

"We observed an unusual surge in traffic to one of our services, which caused some disruption to traffic passing through our network," a Cloudflare spokesperson told CNBC on Tuesday (11/18).

"We do not yet know the cause of this unusual traffic spike," the spokesperson added."We are all on standby to ensure all traffic is served without error."

In the statement, a Cloudflare representative stated that his team continues to work to immediately fix the traffic in an update uploaded to his official page at 21.22 WIB.

In Indonesia, besides X and Downdetector, the BMKG website and the AI Perplexity platform are also inaccessible and display problem notifications on Cloudflare.

Cloudflare software is used by many businesses around the world, including helping manage and secure traffic for about 20 percent of the web.

Among the services provided is protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which is when someone tries to overload a website's system with so many traffic requests that it cannot function.

The current situation has caused Cloudflare shares to plummet by more than 3 percent.

The issue comes less than a month after Amazon Web Services experienced a day-long outage that crippled many online services, followed by a global outage of Microsoft's Azure and 365 cloud services.

In July 2024, a faulty software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused a widespread outage that temporarily halted flights, affected financial services, and prompted hospitals to postpone procedures.

(chri)