You can stop panicking now, we're back.
Do not adjust your monitors, and don't turn your modems off and on again.
If you were experiencing difficulties this morning while trying to go for a daily browse, you might have found yourself staring at a lot of error screens.
This was due to major outages from the internet service Cloudflare, an online security company.
Websites that use Cloudflare's Application Programming Interface (API) were severely impacted by the outages, resulting in 500 and 520 error messages appearing on browsers, and making it impossible to read some websites.
"A critical P0 incident was declared at approximately 06:34AM UTC," Cloudflare's system status site read.
"Connectivity in Cloudflare’s network has been disrupted in broad regions.
"Eyeballs attempting to reach Cloudflare sites in impacted regions will observe 500 errors. The incident impacts all data plane services in our network.
"We will continue updating you when we have more information."
https://twitter.com/Cloudflare/status/1539140097374793728?s=20&t=5PoR8udcYYWvHh9uD3CuWQ
The issue has since been identified, and a fix is being implemented.
Cloudflare are monitoring the results of the fix, so the internet should be back to normal, or at least, as normal as the internet usually is.
Hundreds of well-known brands were affected by the outage, including Amazon, Skype, Steam, and Coinbase.
The outage is the first major one in a number of months, with
Meta experiencing major issues with Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp in late 2021.
The outage impacted multiple countries including Ireland, the UK and the US.
