Core Points - Cloudflare experienced an outage that affected several major websites globally, including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Elon Musk's social media platform X [1][3] - The outage was attributed to a "spike in unusual traffic" observed by Cloudflare around 6:20 a.m. ET, leading to errors in traffic passing through its network [2] - Cloudflare is actively investigating the cause of the traffic spike and is working to resolve the issues [2] - The company's software is critical for managing and securing web traffic for many businesses, providing protection against distributed denial of service attacks [3] - Following the outage, Cloudflare's shares fell by more than 5% in premarket trading [3] - This incident follows recent outages from other major cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure [4]