‘Half the internet’ goes down as cloud outage disrupts major websites

A cloud computing outage caused a short-lived disruption to numerous major websites, with reports describing the incident as taking down "half the internet" before services were restored. The outage, linked to Cloudflare, highlights the internet's heavy reliance on a small number of large infrastructure providers, meaning a single technical fault can ripple across countless unrelated websites and online services simultaneously.

Details of the exact cause were limited, but the disruption appears to have been brief, with affected sites returning to normal operation shortly afterwards. Such incidents typically stem from configuration errors, software bugs or network routing problems at the provider level rather than issues with the individual websites themselves, underscoring the fragility created by widespread dependence on a handful of cloud and content-delivery firms.