INTERNET users were left stunned when some very popular services went down in a big outage on Tuesday because of Cloudflare.
But what is Cloudflare and who owns it? Here’s everything you need to know.
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What is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is a massive network service used by many sites.
It supports services of some of the most popular internet destinations such as Discord, Amazon and Shopify.
Popular games including League of Legends, Minecraft and Valorant are also supported.
Recently, people were being met with a 500 internal server error when trying to access these sites.
It provides security and tools to boost performance for web apps.
One of the biggest things it offers is called a reverse proxy, which protects large sites from attacks.
Who owns Cloudflare?
Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, cofounded the web infrastructure and security company back in 2009.
Cloudflare went public in September 2019. Prince owns 13% of the company.
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It has data centres in more than 270 cities around the world, using its edge network to serve content from the sites it works with to the user.
Is Cloudflare safe?
Cloudflare is safe as it is nothing more that a content delivery network for other websites.
But because it supports so many sites, it can cause problems for users.
Too many requests can cause the server to be overwhelmed and crash.
The recent issue occurred because when Cloudflare experiences issues, it affects all of the websites it serves.
That means when Cloudflare goes down, so does a large section of the internet.
