Cloudflare , a company that invisibly holds up much of the internet , became a lot better known on Tuesday morning.

The company is one of the many huge web infrastructure providers that allow websites to serve their pages to users. As with other similar firms – such as Amazon Web Services – they mostly remain unseen, until something goes wrong.

:: Read our live coverage of the outage here

That happened on Tuesday morning, when many of the world’s biggest websites stopped loading as normal. Visitors to X, formerly known as Twitter, and other sites instead saw a message from Cloudflare itself.

It told them that there had been an error, that the company’s systems were not working properly, and that they should “try again in a few minutes”.

Cloudflare describes itself as “one of the wo

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