New Delhi: Cloudflare is a global internet infrastructure and security company that protects websites from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and other cyber threats. It also provides faster speeds to websites worldwide using its vast data centre network. Its functions Security: It protects websites from DDoS attacks hacking spam and malicious traffic. It also provides firewalls and other security services. Speed: Cloudflare accelerates the loading speed of websites and apps through its worldwide server network. Reliability: It prevents websites from downtime and ensures they are always available. Traffic Management: It distributes user traffic across different servers reducing the load on the websites origin server. Reverse Proxy: It acts as a reverse proxy between the users browser and the websites server which helps with both security and speed. If we talk about the incident that took place on June 21 2022 many websites stopped working simultaneously. Users were unable to access them. This included popular websites like Amazon Web Services Zerodha Twitter (now X) Canva Quora and Udemy. Many international news websites around the world went down for several hours. The outage affected not only websites but also the popular battle royale shooting game Valorant and the open-world game Genshin Impact. What is Cloudflare? Cloudflare is an American company. However this companys working method is quite different. Essentially Cloudflare is known as a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Cloudflare CDN provides data to users from a data centre located close to the visitor. This provides users with a fast website browsing experience. Illustrate this with an example: If someone uses Cloudflare CDN on their website and their blog hosting server is in India. However if a user from Japan wishes to visit the website Cloudflare CDN will provide the websites data to the visitor from its data centre in Japan. This will make the website load significantly faster and provide a better surfing experience. Cloudflare CDN provides a local content delivery network to many websites. This makes Indian websites load as fast for Japanese users as they do for Indian users. Most of the worlds largest websites use Cloudflares services. Other Benefits of Cloudflare Users also use Cloudflare CDN to improve website security and performance. While its basic service is free for increased website capacity and features youll need to subscribe to the companys premium service which incurs a fee. Now you understand why so many websites went down simultaneously. All of these websites used Cloudflare CDN which is why the outage impacted the websites connected to them. Cloudflare CDN also provides a variety of other services. The company provides users with domain name registration hosting for media streaming local network protection and other services. It also protects websites from spam attacks.