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Thousands of popular websites briefly dropped offline on Tuesday due to an issue affecting Cloudflare, an American business that provides content distribution network (CDN) services.

The disruption will be an embarrassment for Cloudflare, which prides itself on being resilient to significant customer outages.

Matthew Prince, the company's co-founder and chief executive, tweeted: "Aware of major Cloudflare issues impacting us network wide. Team is working on getting to the bottom of what's going on. Will continue to update."

Less than 20 minutes later, Mr Prince added: "Appear to have mitigated the issue causing the outage. Traffic restored. Working now to restore all services globally. More details to come as we have them."

Content distribution network services are designed to provide high availability for websites by making sure that a number of computer servers are hosting them and responding to visitor's requests to view them.

Messaging platform Discord was among the Cloudflare clients affected by the outage, along with several cryptocurrency exchanges.

Crypto news site Coindesk said the downtime affected the data it received about Bitcoin - with prices incorrectly displaying as $26 (£20.65) instead of $10,300 (£8,181).

Cloudflare's chief executive told Sky News that a security system error was to blame for the outage, but stressed it was not the result of a cyber attack.

Mr Prince said that the process was related to Cloudflare's security firewall, which provides critical protections across the company's global network.

It was not clear whether the process could occur again without the company disabling aspects of this firewall and potentially leaving customers at risk of attack.

Mr Prince told Sky News that the company's root cause analysis was ongoing and customers would be informed when it concludes.