What is Cloudflare?

For the second time this year, Cloudflare has experienced major issues — this time disrupting a wide range of platforms after what the company called an "unusual spike in traffic."

If you're not familiar with Cloudflare, you're not alone. Often described as "the biggest company you've never heard of," Cloudflare manages and secures traffic for roughly 20 percent of the web.

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is an internet infrastructure and cloud computing provider that functions similarly to Amazon Web Services. The company hosts numerous online services, but it's best known as a global Content Delivery Network, which speeds up websites by routing them through servers located closer to users. In practice, Cloudflare acts as a giant internet middleman — the thing that makes a U.S.-hosted site load quickly even if you're browsing from halfway around the world.

Cloudflare has servers everywhere, and they can cache a huge amount of content. That allows the company to spread traffic across thousands of nodes — individual servers in Cloudflare’s global network — each capable of handling a high volume of requests on its own without passing everything back to the original server. It keeps sites from getting slammed all at once and reduces the chances of an overload.

Your local Cloudflare node is also almost always several hops closer than the server where the site is actually hosted. A hop is just one step in the journey your data takes as it moves through the internet. Fewer hops mean less distance and less time waiting for information to move between points. That shorter path translates to lower latency and faster overall load times.

Because Cloudflare's software underpins so many businesses, outages like this have a significant impact. Tuesday's disruption rippled across the web, taking down or slowing services including OpenAI's ChatGPT, the social platform X, and even digital tools for NJ Transit.