What is Cloudflare that paralyzes the global Internet?

Accordingly, Cloudflare's incident directly affected the operations of many famous websites and applications such as: Canva, ChatGPT, X (Twitter), Grok, Paypal payment system and Spotify.

So what is Cloudflare that paralyzes the global Internet?

Cloudflare experienced an outage on the evening of November 18 (Vietnam time)

Cloudflare is one of the largest providers of website infrastructure, helping websites serve content to users efficiently. Like many other large companies in this space, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare is often unknown to users until something goes wrong.

The company describes itself as "one of the world's largest networks" with "millions of internet properties." According to Cloudflare's website, "today, businesses, nonprofits, bloggers, and anyone with an internet presence can boast faster, more secure websites and apps thanks to Cloudflare."

Cloudflare offers a number of products, but its most prominent is its suite of technologies that help websites stay online even when faced with massive traffic, which can come from unusually high numbers of visitors or from attacks that attempt to take down a website.

In the simplest structure of the Internet, computers request data from origin servers. However, these servers can become overloaded, causing them to slow down or fail completely. Cloudflare and similar companies act as an intermediary layer between users' computers and origin websites, using highly resilient data centers to deliver content quickly and reliably.

At around 6:00 p.m. on November 18 (Vietnam time), Cloudflare, a leading company in the field of providing security services and optimizing internet traffic, encountered a serious problem on its global network system.
In a statement, Cloudflare said its systems were experiencing an error and advised users to "try again in a few minutes." Since Cloudflare powers millions of websites, the outage quickly caused disruption to many sites.
This situation is similar to the outage that Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced last month.
According to the update, at approximately 7 p.m. (Vietnam time), Cloudflare detected and investigated the incident. About 20 minutes later, the company announced that the level of disruption had begun to decrease, although the technical team continued to monitor and handle the problem.
As of 8:15 p.m., Cloudflare said some services were back up and running, while others were still being fixed.

Phan Hoang

Source: https://vtcnews.vn/cloudflare-la-gi-ma-khien-internet-toan-cau-te-liet-ar988104.html