On Tuesday, Cloudflare, a major player in internet infrastructure, experienced a global outage that disrupted access to numerous websites. The issue began around 11:48 AM London time and affected various customers, including sites like X and OpenAI. Users encountered error messages, and site owners struggled to access their performance dashboards. By 2:48 PM, Cloudflare announced that a fix was implemented and the situation was under control, but they continued to monitor for lingering issues. The outage stemmed from a configuration file that exceeded its intended size, causing a crash in the software that manages traffic for several Cloudflare services. A spokesperson clarified that there was no evidence of malicious activity behind the incident. During the troubleshooting, Cloudflare disabled an encryption service called Warp in London, which led to further connectivity issues for users in that area. Professor Alan Woodward from the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security emphasized the critical role of Cloudflare in the internet's infrastructure, calling it a "gatekeeper." He noted that the concentration of power among a few companies means that when one fails, the effects are immediately felt across the web. This incident follows a recent outage of Amazon Web Services, highlighting vulnerabilities in the underlying systems that support many popular websites.