Millions of users across India and the world faced sudden disruption on Tuesday when several major online services stopped working at the same time. Major social media tools, shopping portals, banking services, entertainment apps and even AI tools either loaded slowly or failed to open completely. The issue did not lie with each service but with Cloudflare, which is a company that underpins a big part of the global internet. A technical problem in its system led to a chain reaction that knocked many popular websites and apps out of commission.
The incident once again called attention to how deeply dependent the internet is on a few behind-the-scenes players. As Cloudflare restores the services, operations gradually return to normal on these platforms. Here are all the details, including what Cloudflare is, how it works, and why the discrepancy on it caused your favourite websites to go down.
Cloudflare Inc. is a US-based company that quietly powers a major part of the world’s internet. This company provides services related to content delivery networks (CDNs), cybersecurity solutions, and most importantly, prevention of DDoS attacks, etc. Most users never see it, yet millions of websites depend on it every day.
Cloudflare’s main job is to keep websites safe from cyberattacks, help them load faster, and ensure they stay online even during heavy traffic. It sits between a website and its visitors, acting like a protective and reliable middle layer.
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Cloudflare does three major jobs for businesses and websites. First, it provides security protection through filtering out harmful activity, especially DDoS attacks, which intentionally bombard websites with fake traffic.
Second, it accelerates loading through caching copies of websites in numerous locations across the world. In this case, users have instant access to content from a nearby Cloudflare centre rather than from a remote server.
Thirdly, it controls online traffic by routing visitors through the most stable and efficient routes. This keeps websites from crashing when huge numbers of people attempt to visit them all at once.
Besides that, Cloudflare provides companies with tools to create a secure and stable online presence; it moves data rapidly and safely within its network by spreading it evenly in order to prevent overload. Because Cloudflare operates at such a huge scale, even a small disruption in its system can affect a large portion of the internet.
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When Cloudflare’s network faced technical trouble on Tuesday, the impact was felt across many online platforms at the same time. Social media tools, shopping portals, banking services, entertainment apps and even AI tools stopped working properly. This showed how strongly the modern internet relies on Cloudflare’s systems.
Popular services like Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Canva either refused to load or showed repeated error messages. Since many major platforms depend on Cloudflare to manage traffic and security, the problems clearly pointed to Cloudflare and not to the individual apps.
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Cloudflare later gave an official statement regarding the global outrage. The company, via a blog post, explained that the outage began after a change was made to the permissions of one of its database systems. This mistake caused the database to create many extra entries in a special “feature file” used by its Bot Management system. Because of this, the file became almost double its normal size and was shared across all the machines in Cloudflare’s global network.
The company said that the software which reads this file had a size limit that could not handle the sudden increase. This caused the software to fail and disrupted normal traffic flow. Once Cloudflare engineers found the issue, they quickly released a fix and began restoring services across the world.
Most websites started working normally soon after. The incident showed how important Cloudflare is in keeping thousands of online platforms, from small websites to large global services, running smoothly.