Cloudflare, certainly one of the world’s biggest servers protecting the web from cyberattacks, has crashed, leaving 1000’s offline.
Users of web sites like NHS England and X and web providers like Sky, EE and Three all saw issues skyrocket inside seconds.
The San Francisco-based company said they’re investigating damage to an online cable.
An announcement on their site says: ‘We’re investigating a fibre cut in Eastern North America. Customers connecting through North America or accessing services in Europe might even see increased latencies and timeouts as Cloudflare engineers look to mitigate.’
Social media sites like X also crashed with timelines frozen in time.
Discord, Reddit, Canva, Zoom, Fortnite, Robinhood, Microsoft Teams, and a number of other other services are also experiencing issues.
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Problems appeared to start shortly after 3pm, in line with Downdetector, which showed global reports of issues with X rocketing to almost 30,000 inside minutes.
Cloudflare hosts a world network that sits in front of internet sites to make them load faster and protect them from cyber threats.
If Cloudflare crashes or has a serious outage, it may well have wide knock‑on effects across the web because tens of millions of web sites depend upon it.