If you're not familiar with Cloudflare, you're not alone. Often described as "the biggest company you've never heard of," Cloudflare manages and secures traffic for roughly 20 percent of the web.

Hundreds of thousands of companies rely on the network management company to route online traffic. It’s the internet backbone that broke.

Major internet platforms are experiencing service disruptions on the morning of Nov. 18, following a reported outage by Cloudflare. Here's what we know.

Your internet service provider (ISP) brings the internet into your home through a modem. A router then converts that signal into Wi-Fi, allowing phones, laptops, TVs and other devices to connect without cables. In short, the internet provides the connection, and Wi-Fi makes it accessible to your devices wirelessly.

A global internet outage on Tuesday took down apps from X to ChatGPT. The root cause wasn't a server glitch or cyber attack. It was Cloudflare, the little-known internet giant that quietly powers nearly millions of websites worldwide.

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.

Services like Cloudflare underpin much of the internet, working invisibly in the background. But when things go wrong, it can have major impacts.

Here’s what CloudFlare is, how many people were affected by its Nov. 18 outage and a nonexhaustive list of companies that use CloudFlare services.

Common issues that might cause an internet outage include physical damage to internet infrastructure during construction, servers crashing or overheating, and even accidental misconfigurations —like it happened during the Facebook outage in 2021.

Thousands of people reported issues on popular apps and websites during the morning of Tuesday, Nov. 18. Here's what to know on the Cloudflare outage.