WASHINGTON — One of the core pillars of the internet crumbled Tuesday, or at least sagged, causing issues across some of the most-used services in the world .

ChatGPT, social media platform X, transit infrastructure and other prominent internet services were hit with global outages Tuesday morning because of issues with Cloudflare.

What is Cloudflare and why is it so important?

Most people will recognize Cloudflare from the "Are you a human" check-boxes on certain websites that require a click to verify the user isn't an online bot.

And that's one of the many services Cloudflare provides. It's a cloud infrastructure provider that touts being used by around 20% of all websites on the internet , with Cloudflare including tools to protect websites from cyberattacks and to keep them op

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