Much of the internet has been experiencing issues today as tech company Cloudflare suffered a major technical problem.

X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT are some of the sites which could not show all of their content when the problems arose.

A spokesperson for Cloudflare told The Guardian earlier today that they “saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20am”.

This then “caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors”, they noted.

“While most traffic for most services continued to flow as normal, there were elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services.

“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.”

But what is Cloudflare to begin with, and why does it affect so much of the internet if the company experiences an issue?

Cloudflare describes itself as “one global cloud network unlike any other”.

The cyber network keeps a lot of sites running safely.

It helps sites to manage and secure internet traffic, ensures that the content of lots of sites can load safely, and protects sites from malicious attacks.

In layman’s terms, Cloudflare works behind the scenes to get the content sites want to give us to our screens safely.

As we mentioned, the company helps to deliver a lot of the web’s content.

So when it’s down, or if it experiences technical problems, it doesn’t just affect one company.

“Today about 20% of the web runs through Cloudflare’s network,” the company wrote in 2024. This equates to millions of customers.

As a result, Cloudflare hiccups can have knock-on effects on multiple sites.

ChatGPT, X, and some transit sites (reportedly, the New Jersey transit system was affected, for instance) appeared to experience issues which may be linked to Cloudflare’s tech problems.

Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, online game League of Legends, Moody’s and NJ Transit also had problems today.

There may be many other sites involved, too (TechRadar, for instance, reported its internal HR system was affected).

We don’t yet know when all of the problems will be fixed as of the time of writing.

But there’s good news: Cloudflare’s latest update (14:34, November 18) reads: “We’ve deployed a change which has restored dashboard services. We are still working to remediate broad application services impact.”

Keep an eye on the site’s update page for more information.