By skyforbes 
At first, it looked like another ordinary surge of complaints. A few thousand people in the United States reported that X (the service formerly known as Twitter) would not load. A little while later, companies whose support desks rely on ChatGPT said the system had stopped responding. Gaming networks began reporting timeouts. Then transit systems, online retailers, and media publications began showing the same terse message:
“Unable to establish a secure connection.”
By mid-morning, it had become clear that this was something larger than another platform-specific glitch. A failure at Cloudflare — an infrastructure provider that accelerates and protects a massive share of global web traffic — was rippling outward at a speed that surprised even long-time reliability engineers. Cloudflare is not a household name outside the technology industry, but for modern internet services, it is often the first gate traffic passes through. When that gate jammed, the rest of the system followed.
Cloudflare eventually acknowledged that one of its internal systems responsible for processing and filtering inbound traffic had entered an unhealthy state. A spike in unusual network activity, combined with a software failure in a layer that…