Cloudflare, one of the world’s biggest servers protecting the internet from cyberattacks, has crashed, leaving thousands offline.
The San Francisco-based company hosts a global network that sits in front of websites to make them load faster and protect them from cyber threats.
A statement on their site says: ‘Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary.
‘Traffic might be re-routed from this location, hence there is a possibility of a slight increase in latency during this maintenance window for end-users in the affected region.
‘For PNI / CNI customers connecting with us in this location, please make sure you are expecting this traffic to fail over elsewhere during this maintenance window as network interfaces in this datacentre may become temporarily unavailable.’
Social media sites like X also crashed with timelines frozen in time.
Problems appeared to begin shortly after 3pm, according to Downdetector, which showed global reports of issues with X skyrocketing to nearly 30,000 within minutes.
Sign up for all of the latest stories
Start your day informed with Metro’s News Updates newsletter or get Breaking News alerts the moment it happens.
Users quickly flocked to Downdetector’s comment section, turning the outage page into a makeshift chat room while waiting for service to return.
This is a breaking news story… More to follow…