ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s telecom regulator on Tuesday said it was monitoring a major global outage affecting Cloudflare and was in contact with international platforms and local operators to assess the impact and ensure service restoration.

Cloudflare based in San Francisco is a widely used Internet infrastructure company that protects websites, makes them faster and keeps them online even during attacks or heavy traffic.

A large number of websites and online services worldwide can slow down, break or completely go offline when Cloudflare itself is affected.

“PTA is closely monitoring a major global outage impacting X (Twitter) and Cloudflare,” the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said in a statement.

“PTA is in contact with global platforms and local operators and will continue to observe the situation until services are fully restored.”

In Pakistan, several private and government news websites as well as platforms such as ChatGPT and X were affected by the outage.

Cloudflare has now resolved the issue, but the outage took down a broad range of online services including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms worldwide.

These included Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, and the Moody’s credit ratings service. Moody’s website displayed an Error Code 500 and instructed individuals to visit Cloudflare’s website for more information.

Cloudflare said there was no evidence that the outage was the result of a cyberattack or malicious activity, adding that the root cause of the outage was an automatically generated configuration file for managing threat traffic.

Last month, Microsoft had to deploy a fix to address an outage of their Azure cloud portal that left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft and other services.

Amazon also experienced a massive outage of its cloud computing service in October.

With input from AP