Whoops, a major internet services company just went down

A major player in keeping the internet running smoothly appeared to experience some problems of its own on Tuesday, with reports emerging that Cloudflare went down across parts of the U.S.

You may not be familiar with the name, but you have most certainly run across the work of the company that protects against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and prides itself on making "the Internet Work the Way It Should for Anything Online."

"Anything," apparently, failed to include Cloudflare itself on Tuesday — at least for a short period of time.

"Cloudflare is observing network performance issues in San Jose, California," the company explained in a statement. "We are actively working to reduce or eliminate any impact to Internet users in this region."

Meanwhile, Down Detector — a site that monitors web outages — reported service problems around the world with a concentration across the U.S.

Cloudflare was quick to issue a follow-up statement saying all was well. "We have implemented a fix for this issue and are currently monitoring the results. We will update once we have confirmed it is resolved."

The purported fix, however, didn't happen quickly enough for the internet not to take notice.

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Thankfully for all those who live the #onlinelife, Cloudflare appeared to be up and running again as of 2:30 p.m. Eastern Time. Now we can all go back to endlessly answering captchas. Phew.

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