What is cloudflare?

[paulstung]

So an hour or so ago,I switched my pc on for the first time since this morning,So I opened Firefox and proceeded to a usual website that I use and it opened as to be expected.But when I went to open a new tab to go to Ebay,there was a slight delay,and then this popped up on the screen.

But it will allow me to open bookmarked pages or a cached page it will open as usual.It is only when I open a new tab and it is not bookmarked or cached.It also only happens when I try to do a search on the main search bar,and not on the main page or the little mini Google search bar to the top right of the page,also only with Firefox.
Nothing was installed before or after shut down this morning,it literally happened as soon as I tried to use my browser for the first time this afternoon.I've gone into settings and there is nothing out of the ordinary listed there,the same goes for control panel/programs.
I'm at a loss with this please help.Thanks for reading.

 

[Kyze]

You seem to have set the Searchbar to a sketchy searchprovider (searchab.com)
which is asked when you search via the bar.
This site is hosted on cloudflare and is probably down.

Just set your searchbar to a different provider (not exactly sure where that option was again, you should be able to google that out) and you should be fine in this regard (do a virus-scan to be safe).

 

[paulstung]

No mate,that was the first thing I thought of too.I have set up a second user account in Firefox and it seems to be sorted now.I'm about to do a scan now whilst I'm having my tea.

 

[paulstung]

well scan has just finished and there was 1 threat found a pesky Trojan,so it was removed .But the problem still persists.

 

[yassarikhan786]

Do you have this problem on any other browser? Have you tried re-installing FF?

 

[SuB]

Cloudflare is a distributed contend delivery network (CDN).

Basically you buy a server at place A (lets say the UK for example) but you have customers at location B (lets say the USA).

Delivering content from a server box in the UK to the USA is slower than delivering it from somewhere closer by. So you upload it to a bunch of other data centres all around the world etc...

Then when your USA customer wants to download/view something it's ALOT faster...

Cloudflare is the thing that handles the DNS addressing/data syncing blah blah blah so when you go to the website you get content delivered from the nearest place to you.

Perfectly harmless, but sometimes if it can't talk to home, or it's data centre has a hiccup I guess this is what it looks like.

It's nowt to worry about. It's a kind of easier way to serve content en-masse.

Steam does it for content downloads using it's own system, as does google, again using it's own system. So much so in fact you can google something at home, and get different results to what you would get in the office (much to my annoyance).

Hope that sheds some light on it.