Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare has apologised after a major outage brought down websites including ChatGPT, X and Canva.
The outage happened on Tuesday afternoon, with thousands of users reporting issues with affected sites and services.
Cloudflare, the BBC reports, said the "significant outage" occurred after a configuration file designed to handle threat traffic did not work as intended and "triggered a crash" in its software handling traffic for its wider services.
In a statement, the company said: "We apologise to our customers and the internet in general for letting you down today.
"Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable."
Video conferencing app Zoom was also impacted by the outage, as was music streaming service Spotify and a popular dating app.
Cloudflare confirmed the issue had been fixed but warned some users could still initially encounter errors as they come back online.
The Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce website was unaffected.