New Delhi: M ajor operations on the internet faltered in a duration of a few hours Tuesday, creating a wave of confusion and panic among digital users. Suddenly, trusted sites such as ChatGPT, X, and Canva refused to load, delivering error messages instead. Behind this disruption was one of the invisible pillars of the web: Cloudflare, the San Francisco-based infrastructure company whose network handles roughly one-fifth of global web traffic.

Cloudflare’s own explanation was almost anticlimactic compared to the chaos it caused. According to the company’s statement, the culprit was not a hacker or a power failure, but a software fault with devastating reach.

A routine configuration change triggered a dormant bug inside the system that powers the company’s bot-manage

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