Many of us had never heard of Cloudfare before yesterday.
But after the US online services provider experienced a major outage thousands of users globally were impacted, and Cloudflare became somewhat of a household name.
Major websites including social network X and AI chatbot ChatGPT were disrupted after the company said it had been affected by a "latent bug".
You may not have heard of Cloudflare unless you're working in the technology area within businesses, according to Cathal Slattery, Head of Professional Services at Ekco an Irish-headquartered cybersecurity specialist.
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland he said it's one of these things that just sits in the background.
"It's like the foundation or the plumbing of your house and unfortunately when something goes wrong, it's only then you understand what it is that's actually sitting there keeping everything working together," said Mr Slattery.
The company said the outage was caused by an automatically generated configuration file, designed to manage potential security threats.
It said the file grew too large and crashed the software system handling traffic for several Cloudflare services, whose network handles around a fifth of global web traffic.
This crash caused Cloudflare to go offline and had a ripple consequence on the internet given the volume of services that rely on the company.
"When something like that goes down, it has a dramatic impact out there. It would sit in front of websites so when that user is trying to access it the website behind it such as your Spotify, such as your X or your ChatGPT, that website was still live, it was online, but Cloudflare sitting in front of it was down, so users could not access it," explained Mr Slattery.
The outage is the latest to hit internet services. Microsoft's Azure had also faced an issue last month, while disruption at Amazon caused global turmoil among thousands of websites and apps, such as Snapchat and Reddit earlier in October.
When it comes to technical glitches, no services are infallible.
"None of them have 100% uptime, and there's always going to be SLAs (Service Level Agreements) of 99.9%," said Mr Slattery.
"People really need to think of what resiliency you can have in place to stop an outage like this happening in the first place," he added.
Mr Slattery said Irish businesses need to consider what keeps their business online, what plan they have in place if that service goes off-line and the impact that can have to their business.
"Have you tested plans for redundancy, really having that resiliency mindset off the back of it, and then risk acceptance of the likes of these third parties? how reliant are you for your business if these go off-line," said Mr Slattery.
"There's various different methods you can do, people process technology to make sure you have that resiliency in place for these types of incidents," he advised.
