Cloudflare suffered an outage on Tuesday that briefly took several major websites offline for users worldwide.

Most affected sites were restored within hours. By 9:57 a.m. ET, the company said it had applied a fix, though some users might still face difficulties accessing its online dashboard.

“We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” the company added.

E-commerce platform Shopify, job search engine Indeed, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, President Donald Trump’s Truth Social, and Elon Musk’s X were among the sites affected by the Cloudflare outage, according to Downdetector, which also experienced temporary accessibility issues.

Some digital services from NJ Transit were also disrupted.

OpenAI reported on its status page that ChatGPT and its Sora short-form video app were recovering after encountering problems linked to a “third-party service provider.”

A Cloudflare spokesperson said the company detected a “spike in unusual traffic” to one of its services around 6:20 a.m. ET, which led to errors for some traffic passing through its network.

“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson added. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”

Cloudflare’s software supports businesses globally, managing and securing traffic for roughly 20 per cent of all websites.