Cloudflare, a major provider of internet infrastructure, faced considerable outages on Tuesday morning, impacting numerous East Coast users attempting to log in for work. The company has stated that unusual, high traffic directed towards its services caused the disruption. Cloudflare has yet to confirm whether this traffic was malicious.

In a statement to Mashable, Cloudflare elaborated:

“We detected a surge in atypical traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services starting at 11:20 UTC. This led to some traffic traversing Cloudflare’s network encountering errors. We do not currently know why there was a spike in unusual traffic. Our team is fully engaged to ensure all traffic is processed without issues. Following this, we will focus on investigating the reason behind the unusual traffic surge. We will provide updates on cloudflarestatus.com and a more detailed analysis when it is available on blog.cloudflare.com.”

This increase in traffic caused widespread problems on Tuesday. The scope of affected services was broad, including prominent platforms such as OpenAI, X, and Grindr. Ultimately, any internet user could be affected by a Cloudflare outage. Reports of issues on Downdetector continued to climb as of 10 a.m. ET, indicating persistent problems. (Note: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, which is the parent company of Mashable.)

Cloudflare’s most recent status update said, “We’ve implemented a change that has restored dashboard services. We are still addressing the broad impact on application services.”

Like the recent AWS outage, Cloudflare is an integral part of the internet. Its downtime leads to significant and widespread repercussions, as seen on Tuesday.