By bizn_fun 
Cloudflare is a huge provider of internet security across the world, carrying out services such as checking visitor connections to sites are coming from humans rather than bots.
It says 20% of all websites worldwide use its services in some form.
It is unclear how many of those websites have been affected by this outage, and to what extent.
Downdetector itself – a site many flock to when sites stop loading or appear to have issues – also displayed an error message as many tried to access it on Tuesday.
Alp Toker, director of NetBlocks, which monitors the connectivity of web services, said the outage “points to a catastrophic disruption to Cloudflare’s infrastructure”.
“What’s striking is how much of the internet has had to hide behind Cloudflare infrastructure to avoid denial of service attacks in recent years,” he told the BBC – highlighting how the company aims to protect sites against malicious attempts to overwhelm them with traffic requests.
He said that however, as a result of this – and the convenience of its services – it had also become “one of the internet’s largest single points of failure.”
Issues affecting Cloudflare’s services come after an outage impacting Amazon Web Services last month saw more than 1,000 sites and apps knocked offline.
Another major web services provider, Microsoft Azure, was also affected shortly afterwards.
“The outages we have witnessed these last few months have once again highlighted the reliance on these fragile networks,” said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET.
“Companies are often forced to heavily rely on the likes of Cloudflare, Microsoft, and Amazon for hosting their websites and services, as there aren’t many other options.”