HUNDREDS of websites were knocked offline on Tuesday following an outage at web infrastructure service Cloudflare.

This was caused by a major outage at the content delivery network which caused hundreds of websites across the Internet to stop working and display the error message.

Visitors to that site and others saw a message saying: “500 Internal Server Error”, according to web monitoring service Down Detector and Internet users.

Websites make use of Cloudflare to deliver content from the cloud safely, for users to utilise them.

The shutdown hit websites like messaging platform Discord, Fitbit, Peloton, Grindr, Ring, bet365, Google, NordVPN, JustEat and Ladbrokes and e-commerce service Shopify.

The National Rail Enquiries website was also down and could have been affected, but it was already experiencing a surge in traffic because of Tuesday’s rail strikes which could have caused connection issues.

John Graham-Cumming, the firm’s chief technology officer, said on a Hacker News thread that the outage didn’t spread worldwide, but affected “a lot of places.”

In a series of Twitter posts, the firm confirmed it was aware of the “current service issues” and said its team was “working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible”.

Cloudflare says it is monitoring the result of the implemented fix, hours after stating the issue had been resolved.

The United States company is a content delivery service and its technology helps to power many of the major websites used by Internet users every day.