The shutdown affected sites such as the Discord messaging platform and the e-commerce service Shopify. The National Rail Inquiries website was also down and could have been affected, but was already experiencing an increase in traffic due to current rail strikes that could have caused connection problems. Visitors to this site and others saw a message saying “500 Internal Server Error”, according to the Down Detector web monitoring service and Internet users. Cloudflare, an American company, says the issue has now been resolved. In a series of Twitter posts, she confirmed that she was aware of “current service issues” and said her team was “working to resolve it as soon as possible”. The American company is a content delivery service and its technology helps power many of the most important websites used by Internet users on a daily basis. Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail platform was also hit by service issues on Tuesday. According to the Microsoft Service Status website, some Outlook users “may not be able to access their mailboxes by any login method” and may experience “delays in sending, receiving, or accessing email messages.” Microsoft issue is not related to the Cloudflare shutdown.
