Cloudflare outage shuts down multiple sites. What is it?

CHENNAI: Earlier today, a temporary outage at Cloudflare, a prominent Content Delivery Network (CDN) for many businesses, brought down many websites throughout the world, leaving many of them completely unreachable to the general public.

Cloudflare is an American CDN, which primarily serves as a reverse proxy between a website's browser and the hosting provider of a Cloudflare customer. It is a service that protects websites from all manner of attacks, while simultaneously optimising performance.

The outage affected the usage of popular websites like Canva, Discord and Zerodha. Most website visitors were unable to access these websites and their related individual pages displayed "500 Internal Server Error" on their screen owing to the outage.

Cloudflare addressed the outage via a tweet which stated “The Cloudflare team is aware of the current service issues and is working to resolve as quickly as possible.” Cloudflare has now resolved the issues and the websites that were briefly down are up and running.