Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest companies providing security and content delivery services to websites worldwide, has encountered technical difficulties. As a result, many websites, news portals and other media outlets around the world have been shut down. The disaster occurred around the world after Tuesday evening. Numerous sites, including domestic and foreign media, social media ‘X’ (formerly Twitter), and movie review site Letterbox, could not be accessed. When users tried to access these sites, they saw a message. It was mentioned that the page could not be loaded (opened) due to a problem with Cloudflare. According to multiple international media sources, Cloudflare provides various important services to websites, including preventing cyber attacks, controlling high levels of traffic, and delivering content to customers quickly. Since a large portion of websites operating worldwide depend on this platform, even a minor error in their system can affect many websites at once. When users around the world, including Bangladesh, try to access these sites, they are told – ‘There has been an internal server error on Cloudflare’s network. Please try again in a few minutes.’ Acknowledging the outage, Cloudflare said in an immediate statement that the investigation is underway and will provide updates as soon as information is received. A short while later, the authorities said that they have identified the problem and are working to resolve it quickly. Meanwhile, the platform Down Detector, which monitors website outages, was also initially affected by the same problem. However, when the site was loaded after a while, it was seen that the number of reports of website outages around the world had increased dramatically. This makes it clear that thousands of websites around the world had become inactive due to Cloudflare’s problem. It is not yet known exactly how many websites have been affected by this disaster. However, technology analysts say that when a major error occurs in an important service like Cloudflare, many sites become inactive at once, and this is not the first time. This type of situation has happened before, once again highlighting the risks of an institutionalized reliance on internet infrastructure.