On Thursday afternoon, extensive sections of the internet faced outages, affecting numerous services, including Cloudflare.

Down Detector noted a rise in user-reported problems for the popular IT tool, but Cloudflare was not the sole service impacted. A range of major websites and services, including Spotify, Google, Snapchat, Discord, Nintendo, and Character.ai, also experienced a surge in reported issues on Down Detector. (Note: Ziff Davis owns both Mashable and Down Detector.)

Cloudflare has been issuing regular updates regarding the situation on its status page. The most recent update mentioned: “Cloudflare’s essential Workers KV service went offline due to an outage of a third-party service that is a vital dependency.” This update was shared around 4 p.m. ET, suggesting that the problems persisted for several hours after first being detected.

“Cloudflare engineers are actively working to restore services immediately,” the company reported. “We recognize the significant impact this outage has created and are fully engaged in restoring all services as swiftly as possible.”

The notable increase on Down Detector has begun to diminish, and in a prior update around 3:15 p.m. ET, the company indicated it was “beginning to see services recover,” yet still predicted “intermittent errors.”

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare delivers IT management for a variety of businesses, improving website security, hosting, and functionality. It partners with numerous sites you may utilize each day.

“Cloudflare facilitates Internet requests for millions of websites and handles 78 million HTTP requests per second on average,” according to its website.

This story is ongoing and will be updated as further details emerge.