Cloudflare stock closed the Nov. 18 trading session 2.83% lower at $196.53. The outage exacerbated the ongoing sell-off of the stock, and the closing price is 22.4% lower than the stock's peak closing price of $253.30 on October 31.

Many popular internet services experienced slowdowns and outages Tuesday morning, with the major web infrastructure company Cloudflare saying a bug led to broad problems on its network.

As soon as social media users were able to get online following the outage, conspiracy theories began to circulate online.

According to Lee, a configuration file like the one Cloudflare describes “drives routing security policies, load balancing decisions, and how traffic is distributed globally.” If the file suddenly increases in size, “it can trigger slower parsing, memory issues, CPU contention, or logic failures inside the systems that rely on it,” Lee adds.

Cloudflare added, "Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. We will learn from today's incident and improve.

We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal," Cloudflare said in an update at 14:42 UTC. Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, Dane Knecht, admitted to failing customers and offered an apology in an X post.