What is Cloudflare? The invisible service behind today’s mass internet issues
What is Cloudflare and why are many websites not working?
- Cloudflare, a significant internet infrastructure provider, has experienced an outage on Friday morning, causing numerous websites to become inaccessible – including DownDetector, a site that monitors outages on other websites.
- Visitors to a number of pages saw a “500 internet server error” warning, rather than the content they expected – a similar issue also occurred in November.
- Cloudflare operates one of the world's largest networks, offering services that enable millions of internet properties to maintain faster and more secure online presences.
- The company's primary role involves acting as an intermediary to ensure websites remain online and can manage high volumes of traffic, including protection against attacks.
- This incident underscores how issues with critical infrastructure providers, similar to a previous Amazon Web Services outage, can swiftly impact a wide array of seemingly unconnected websites.