CLOUDFLARE, a major company providing a wide range of services aimed at enhancing the security, performance, and reliability of websites and online services across the world is currently experiencing a hitch.

Its collapse on Tuesday, November 18, sparked a global outage, flooding websites and social media apps with error messages and disrupting users worldwide.

Cloudflare, a US company that provides critical services like defending websites against malicious attacks, experienced an unidentified problem that prevented users from accessing its customers’ sites.

A spokesperson for Cloudflare said: “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11.20 am. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. While most traffic for most services continued to flow as normal, there were elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services.

“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.”

The outage occurred on a day when Cloudflare engineers were scheduled to carry out maintenance on data centres in several cities, including Tahiti, Los Angeles, and Santiago.

However, the company has not confirmed if these planned activities were related to the unexpected traffic spike that caused the global disruption.