One of the largest internet services providers went down on Tuesday night (NZ time), knocking popular sites offline and causing panic among users.
Websites rely on Cloudflare to work in between them and visitors to prevent the site from being overwhelmed by a DDoS attack. So when at around 7:00pm there was a global Cloudflare outage, it caused thousands of websites to go dark.
Many popular services such as Discord, Omegle, Shopify and gaming sites such as Minecraft and League of Legends were hit.
The company said it is investigating the "widespread issue" and has implemented a fix that they are monitoring.
"Users may experience errors or timeouts reaching Cloudflare's network or services," Cloudflare said.
However, many social media users are freaking out over the outage.
"Panic mode activated," one user said.
"Half the internet is down due to a Cloudflare outage," another person said.
Just under an hour after the outage, Cloudflare said they had resolved the incident.
"Earlier today Cloudflare saw an outage across parts of our network. This was not the result of an attack," a spokesperson said.
"A network change in some of our data centers caused a portion of our network to be unavailable.
"Due to the nature of the incident, customers may have had difficulty reaching websites and services that rely on Cloudflare from approximately 0628-0720 UTC. Cloudflare was working on a fix within minutes, and the network is running normally now.
"Given Cloudflare’s scale and the percentage of the Internet that relies on our network, when we have problems it is vital that we are open and transparent about what happened, why it happened, and what we’re doing to ensure it doesn’t happen again."
