Cloudflare, one of the world’s biggest servers protecting the internet from cyberattacks, has crashed, leaving thousands offline.
Users of sites like NHS England and X and internet providers like Sky, EE and Three all saw issues skyrocket within seconds.
The San Francisco-based company said they are investigating damage to an internet cable.
A statement on their site says: ‘We are investigating a fibre cut in Eastern North America. Customers connecting through North America or accessing services in Europe may see increased latencies and timeouts as Cloudflare engineers look to mitigate.’
Discord, Reddit, Canva, Zoom, Fortnite, Robinhood, Microsoft Teams, and several other services are also experiencing issues.
Problems appeared to begin shortly after 3pm, according to Downdetector, which showed global reports of issues with X rocketing to nearly 30,000 within minutes.
Cloudflare hosts a global network that sits in front of websites to make them load faster and protect them from cyber threats.
If Cloudflare crashes or has a major outage, it can have wide knock‑on effects across the internet because millions of sites depend on it.