The internet and its fallible middlemen

Last month, when Cloudflare’s systems went down for half a day, websites from Ikea to ChatGPT refused to open, showing HTTP errors on browsers.

We take our digital lives for granted. After all, the Internet has always been there for most of us. Through the browser and apps in our hands, we search the meaning of life, where to shop, what to wear to a wedding, how to do a birthday party. We read reviews for a new restaurant, book it online, chat with our family and to our AI digital companions, without realising that all of these actions are possible thanks to a

Cloudflare is an infrastructure-as-a-service company, one of the handful that has a large, distributed secure network (the backbone of the internet) to connect users like us to each other’s devices, and computers. (Shutterstock)