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After half the internet crashed on Tuesday evening, Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht took to social media to reveal what caused the widespread outage.

Users who were trying to log on to X, ChatGPT etc were shown the message: “Internal server error on Cloudflare’s network, please try again in a few minutes.”

Turning into damage control mode, Knecht said, “I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused.”

Major sites, including X, ChatGPT, Canva and others were hit by the outage. However, Knecht clarified that it was “not an attack.”

“Transparency about what happened matters, and we plan to share a breakdown with more details in a few hours. In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack,” he explained.

Acknowledging that the impact caused by the outage and time to resolved it is unacceptable, he said, “Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today. The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most and we are going to do what it takes to earn that back.”

This comes a month after Amazon Web Services experienced a similar snag, disrupting several websites including WhatsApp, Reddit, Snapchat, and Fortnite.