India, Nov. 18 -- A major Cloudflare outage on Tuesday evening disrupted several global websites and apps, including X, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Spotify and PayPal. The issue caused widespread "500 errors", a message indicating that a website's server is malfunctioning.

Other platforms like Shopify, Udemy, several news and media websites, among others, also were offline.

The issue began after a spike in unusual traffic around 11:20 AM GMT (16:50 PM IST). The company said some traffic moving through its network started returning errors, though most services continued to run normally.

By late evening, Cloudflare said it had deployed fixes and restored most functions, but users could still face higher error rates as systems stabilise. The com...