Cloudflare , a company that invisibly holds up much of the internet , has become a lot better known this year.

It’s one of the many huge web infrastructure providers that allow websites to serve their pages to users. These businesses mostly remain in the background until something goes wrong .

That happened a few weeks ago, and again on Friday morning , when many of the world’s biggest websites stopped loading as normal .

In November, 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 world’s largest networks”, with “millions of inter

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