Several websites across the world were briefly unavailable on Tuesday afternoon after one of the internet’s biggest domain name server service providers suffered a service outage.

Cloudflare said that it was having network performance issues and warned that “Customers may be experiencing 502 errors” while accessing sites which use the service.

Websites such as Discord, Udemy, Medium, and internet outage monitor Down Detector were among those rendered unavailable by the incident.

In Malta, Times of Malta, other news sites, multiple government websites, Bank of Valletta, the Planning Authority and MaltaPark were among websites affected.

The company implemented a fix around 20 minutes after the issue was first reported.

“We will update the status once the issue is resolved,” they said.

Company CEO Matthew Prince tweeted that problems appeared to have been mitigated. “Traffic restored. Working now to restore all services globally. More details to come as we have them”.

It is the second time in 10 days that Cloudflare has experienced technical issues.

On June 24, the company said a “widespread BGP routing leak” had impacted some of its IP ranges, momentarily taking down customers’ sites and apps in the process.

What are DNS services?

BGP routes traffic through internet transit providers and on to DNS services like Cloudflare.

Cloudflare provides services for Domain Name Systems, which Cloudflare’s website describes as “the phonebook of the internet”.

Each website on the internet has a unique IP address, which is a string of numbers separated by full stops. DNS servers eliminate the need for humans to memorise those numerical addresses, translating them into the domain names everyone is familiar with.