Here's why the internet crashes thousands of times a year Updated / Thursday, 10 Dec 2020 15:00 In 2017 alone, there were about 14,000 incidents which caused millions of websites worldwide to go offline Analysis: the internet is currently a cyber Wild West, but its outlaw days may be slowly coming to an end How could a small internet service provider (ISP) in Pennsylvania cause millions of websites worldwide to go offline? That’s what happened on June 24th 2019 when users across the world were left unable to access a large fraction of the web. The root cause was an outage suffered by Cloudflare, one of the internet’s leading content hosts on which the affected websites relied.