DOZENS of websites have been crippled by a major outage which sparked chaos across the globe.

Twitter, Spotify and Uber were among a number hit when Cloudflare – an internet network services business – went down shortly after 11am this morning.

More than 10,000 people reported issues related to Cloudflare on DownDetector – a site also hit by the outage – although the true scale of the impact is set to be far more.

Zoom, Cloudflare itself, X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Uber, League of Legends, Grindr and more were all shut down by the catastrophic failure with roughly a fifth of all internet sites using some form of Cloudflare service.

The outage rippled out from its source across a huge portion of the internet with the firm behind Cloudflare working desperately to restore services.

The firm provides web security, speed, and routing services for millions of sites, so when it goes down, anything that relies on it cannot load.

The outage is understood to have originated from Cloudflare Global Network – a distributed network of data centres that connects users to websites.

Downdetector, a site used to report outages, saw tens of thousands of reports that major websites were out of action in the wake of the monumental outage.

Cloudflare said it is desperately working to restore services after reports of the problem began flooding in.

The firm said it suffered an “internal service degradation” that may intermittently impact some services. 

Cloudflare operates a massive network of servers across more than 330 locations in over 120 countries. 

These help websites load faster and handle traffic smoothly, the system connects some 13,000 internet networks, including some of the world’s biggest internet providers.

Global Amazon outage crashes Reddit, Ring, Starbucks and more apps as ‘half the internet goes down’

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Ikea and Vinted have also been hit in the latest outage, with nearly 200 users reporting issues accessing Uber.

Multiplayer games and even the Scottish Parliament website have been impacted by the huge service failure.

Cloudflare is one of the world’s biggest network providers with 20 per cent of all websites using its services in some form.

By midday tens of thousands of service outage reports had been made and a huge portion of the internet was left unable to load.

A statement from the company read: “Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers.

“Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”

Cloudflare, which runs services such as checking that visitors to websites are humans rather than bots, says around a fifth of all global websites use some of its services.

The company had scheduled maintenance for the SCL (Santiago) data centre for Tuesday.

Amazon Web Services has also been hit by the outage, while X users have been posting on Downdetector about the issues.

One wrote: “When I try to log in, I receive the following error message: ‘Oops, something went wrong. Please try again later’.”

Another said: “Keep getting suspicious log in message when I try to log in and blocks me logging in, what is going on?”

A third person posted: “My DMs on Twitter are not loading. It just says empty box. Yesterday it was fine.”

The problem at Cloudflare comes less than a month after a similar outage of Amazon Web Services brought down thousands of sites.

This is a breaking news story. You can follow us for more updates.