A recent internet infrastructure outage has disrupted numerous websites and services, affecting key platforms such as major Australian airports, Uber, and ChatGPT.

Cloudflare, a company known for its content delivery network and security services, reported that its global network was encountering issues at approximately 11:50 am GMT (10:50 pm AEDT) on Tuesday.

The company, valued at $US70 billion (approximately $107.7 billion), claims that about 20% of the internet relies on its network. It serves millions of customers, including 35% of the Fortune 500 companies.

“We are aware of an issue impacting multiple customers, resulting in widespread 500 errors, and affecting the Cloudflare Dashboard and API,” Cloudflare stated.

“Our team is working to understand the full extent of the problem and to implement solutions. Further updates will be provided soon.”

About 11.20pm, the company said services were recovering but customers might keep seeing “higher-than-normal error rates”.

Errors were persisting with multiple sites well after 1am.

APIs are used to connect between different platforms, sites or services, 500 errors are generic errors usually linked to web servers and companies use the dashboard to manage their Cloudflare services.

Affected sites included X, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide airports, and Downdetector, which uses Cloudflare to verify users aren’t bots before letting them access the site.

When Downdetector returned to functionality it also showed spikes in outage complaints from users of Amazon Web Services, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, film site Letterboxd, dating app Grindr, popular online game League of Legends and design app Canva.

Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Google services appeared to be working normally.