Cloudflare Crash Explained: Yesterday, millions of internet users around the world had to face a big problem. Suddenly many sites stopped working. Among these, many big websites like X, ChatGPT, Canva and Spotify suddenly came to a standstill. Everyone’s work was affected due to this global outage. Technical glitch in Cloudflare was the major reason for this global outage.

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is an American technology company, which in simple language you can call the ‘traffic police’ of the Internet. It works directly between internet users and the hosting server of the website. It mainly provides a content delivery network. CDN is a network of servers that stores website data in its data centers around the world.

What does Cloudflare do?

It protects the website from DDoS attacks. This prevents dangerous bots, malware, and excessive traffic from reaching the website’s actual servers, thus preventing hackers from directly attacking.
Apart from this, this CDN provides website data to the user from the data center. This makes the website load faster, giving the user a better browsing experience. If a website’s server crashes, Cloudflare’s CDN continues to serve a copy of the website, keeping the site running.

Why does the internet stop due to its malfunction?

When a major technical failure or software bug occurs in Cloudflare’s systems, it impacts the millions of websites that rely on its services. Cloudflare acts like a security shield. When Cloudflare’s system goes down, millions of websites’ access to their users is blocked.