San Francisco, California - A technical fault at internet services provider Cloudflare downed dozens of major websites and apps on Tuesday, including X and President Donald Trump's Truth Social.

OpenAI's artificial intelligence service ChatGPT was also out of action.

Cloudflare is a global internet infrastructure and security provider whose services are designed to make websites faster and more secure. The service is particularly well known for its DDoS defense, which protects websites from being paralyzed by mass requests.

Cloudflare's status website initially reported that it was aware of the issue and was working to resolve it.

According to a statement obtained by TechRadar, Cloudlflare had detected a "spike in unusual traffic" around half an hour earlier.

"That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare's network to experience errors," the company said.

"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."

As of 9:30 AM, the outage had not been fully resolved, with many websites and platforms returning online before crashing again.

Cloudflare previously experienced a major outage incident in July.