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Cloudflare is a US-based company that provides internet infrastructure used by millions of websites and online services. Its tools can help sites load more quickly, protect them from cyber attacks and keep them available during heavy traffic.

Because Cloudflare sits between many websites and their visitors, problems with its systems can affect services that have no direct connection to one another. The impact can range from pages loading slowly to users being unable to reach a site or use particular features.

Outages at large internet infrastructure providers highlight how much of the web relies on a relatively small number of specialist companies. Whether users are affected depends on which Cloudflare products a service uses and where the disruption occurs.