GREENSBORO, N.C. — A widespread internet outage early Tuesday disrupted major websites around the world and caused local issues in Greensboro after a failure at Cloudflare , a company that helps route traffic and protect websites. According to Cloudflare , the outage began around 5 a.m. and was largely resolved by 1 p.m.

North Carolina A&T IT analyst and instructor Edmundson Effort explained how Cloudflare works and why so many major platforms rely on it. “Cloudflare will come along and say, 'Hey, I see you have this wonderful app that everybody's using, we can help speed it up. We can also help with some cybersecurity mitigation strategies, and we can make it so that your end users have a better experience',” Effort said.

He said outages can spread quickly because of how connected s

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