Internet issue takes down Australian airport websites and other services worldwide

Another internet infrastructure outage has taken down a range of websites and services, including most major Australian airports, Uber and ChatGPT.

The issue, which also coincided with outages for Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, and the Moody's credit ratings service, was identified quickly but problems lasted for hours.

Content delivery network and security services provider Cloudflare first said its global network was "experiencing issues" just before 11.50am GMT (10.50pm AEDT) on Tuesday.

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The $US70 billion ($107.7 billion) company boasts that about 20 per cent of the web runs through its network and it has millions of customers, including 35 per cent of the Fortune 500.

"Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing," it said.

"We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly."

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.

The company rolled out a fix about 1.45am on Wednesday but said "intermittent errors" remained a few hours later, although they were reducing.

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.

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New Jersey Transit said parts of its digital services might be temporarily unavailable or slow to load and New York City Emergency Management said there were reports of city services being impacted by the outage.

In France, national railway company SNCF's website was affected. The company warned customers "some information and schedules may not be available or up to date".

"Our teams are working to restore these services as quickly as possible," it said.

Cloudflare, based in San Francisco, works behind the scenes to make the internet faster and safer, but when problems flare up "it results in massive digital gridlock" for internet users, cybersecurity expert Professor Mike Chapple said.

While most people think there's a direct line between their digital device and a website, what actually happens is that companies like Cloudflare sit in the middle of those connections, he said.

"When you access a website protected by Cloudflare, your computer doesn't connect directly to that site," Chapple said.

"Instead, it connects to the nearest Cloudflare server, which might be very close to your home. That protects the website from a flood of traffic, and it provides you with a faster response.

"It's a win-win for everyone, until it fails, and 20 per cent of the internet goes down at the same time."

Last month Microsoft had to deploy a fix to address an outage of their Azure cloud portal that left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft and other services.

Amazon experienced a massive outage of its cloud computing service in October. The company resolved the issue, but the outage took down a broad range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms.

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