New Delhi | A widespread internet outage struck several global digital platforms on Tuesday, leaving millions of users unable to access services like X, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, Google Cloud, and Canva.

Popular gaming titles League of Legends and Valorant were also impacted.

The disruption has been traced back to a critical network failure at Cloudflare, a web infrastructure company that powers a significant portion of the internet.

"Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly," Cloudflare's system status site showed, identifying the problem as a "global network issue" causing widespread API and dashboard failures.

Outage tracking website Downdetector saw a massive spike in reports, logging over 10,000 complaints for various service disruptions before the site itself struggled to load - ironically, also becoming a victim of the Cloudflare outage.

As screens went blank, users flocked to the few surviving platforms, such as Reddit and Threads, to vent their frustration and crack jokes about the "internet meltdown".

"My entire staff portal and sites are using Cloudflare, so everything is down," a netizen said, while another took a dig at how the outage happened just after maintenance.

"Cloudflare being down, and almost all of my most visited websites and mobile banking are also down with them, means that it's probably not smart for these companies to put all of their cybersecurity eggs in one basket," another user quipped.