“Today we saw a widespread Internet outage online that impacted multiple providers,” said Laurel Toney, spokeswoman for Cloudflare. “Cloudflare’s automated systems detected the problem and routed around them, but the extent of the problem required manual intervention as well.”
Services like Cloudflare are designed to prevent direct denial of service attacks, in which massive networks of computers send malicious traffic to websites to take them offline. The services also help keep sites running smoothly when traffic spikes during shopping seasons or when a site hosts a viral video.
Cloudflare did not respond to a request for comment.
This is a developing story. It will be updated.