Dozens of websites have been affected after the Cloudflare issue (Picture by Cheng Xin/Getty Images)

Thousands of people reported the internet crashing after triggering a flood of complaints.

Users of sites like NHS England and X and internet providers like Sky,EE and Three all saw issues skyrocket at around 3pm on Monday.

Cloudflare,a San Francisco-based company,said they are investigating damage to an internet cable in North America. But it is believed to be unrelated to the rest of the outages experienced globally.

A spokesperson told Metro: ‘We don’t see any Cloudflare global outage currently. The only issue we’re aware of is that Zayo,a network provider,is experiencing an outage on some of its network routes.

‘That may cause some sites using Zayo exclusively to be unreachable,whether they use Cloudflare or not. We are seeing evidence Zayo’s network is recovering and expect any errors to be short lived.’

Social media sites like X also crashed with timelines frozen in time.

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Start your day informed with Metro's News Updates newsletter or get Breaking News alerts the moment it happens.Discord,Reddit,Canva,Zoom,Fortnite,Robinhood,Microsoft Teams,and several other services also experienced issues.Problems appeared to begin shortly after 3pm,according to Downdetector,which showed global reports of issues with X rocketing to nearly 30,000 within minutes.Cloudflare hosts a global network that sits in front of websites to make them load faster and protect them from cyber threats.If Cloudflare crashes or has a major outage,it can have wide knock‑on effects across the internet because millions of sites depend on it.A list of sites all suffering outages on Monday afternoon (Picture:downdetector)A statement on the Cloudflare site says: ‘We are investigating a fibre cut in Eastern North America. Customers connecting through North America or accessing services in Europe may see increased latencies and timeouts as Cloudflare engineers look to mitigate.’Engineers must locate the break,dispatch repair crews and splice the cable back together before normal service can be restored.Web3 Antivirus,a software company designed to protect financial assets,said on X: ‘When major services like X,Discord,Canva and others start having issues,users may get trapped via ‘alternative’ access points,status updates and temporary mirrors.‘A fake backup link or mirror page can look helpful during an outage,but it may lead to phishing pages,fake login forms,wallet drainers or malicious downloads.’