Cloudflare, a company that usually works quietly behind the scenes to keep much of the internet running smoothly. Found itself front and center on Tuesday morning after a major outage disrupted access to some of the world’s biggest websites, as per a report.
Cloudflare outage brings down major websites worldwide
The company is part of a large group of web-infrastructure providers, such as Amazon Web Services, that help websites deliver pages to users, as per an Independent report. Most of the time, their work goes unnoticed, but when something breaks, their absence becomes instantly visible, as per the report.
Why so many sites are failing to load?
Cloudflare describes itself as one of the world’s largest networks, powering millions of internet properties, as per the report. Its tools help businesses, nonprofits, bloggers, and anyone with an online presence run faster and more secure websites and apps, as per the Independent report. The company offers a range of products, but its most essential role is keeping websites online when they face heavy traffic, as per the report. That traffic may come from genuine surges in visitors or from attacks aimed at overwhelming and disabling a website, reported the Independent.
In a typical internet setup, a computer requests a website and a server delivers the data. But if too many people request the same site at once, that server can slow to a crawl or crash entirely, as per the report. Cloudflare solves that problem by placing its own systems between users and original servers, relying on its vast network of resilient data centers to keep sites fast and stable, as per the Independent report.
How the cloudflare not working affected websites?
The downside is that when Cloudflare runs into trouble. It can bring down countless websites at once, and because its services support such a wide mix of platforms. Outages can hit many unrelated websites simultaneously, as per the report. A similar situation occurred last month when Amazon Web Services, another major internet backbone, suffered an outage that triggered widespread disruption. Like Cloudflare, AWS usually fades into the background, until it doesn’t.
What causes Cloudflare outages?
Cloudflare outages can result from network bugs, server overloads, configuration errors, or cyber attacks. These issues can temporarily disrupt internet services across the globe.