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Dozens of popular websites crashed on Friday, possibly leaving millions without access.

Issues began around 6.40am ET, affecting a range of services including Apple Pay, DoorDash, Reddit and Hulu streaming service, according to Downdetector, which monitors online outages.

The cause of the widespread disruption has not been confirmed, but Cloudflare said it was investigating network-performance problems across Western North America.

Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest internet infrastructure companies, routing online traffic and helping websites remain fast, secure and accessible.

The Cloudflare investigation followed a surge in outage reports beginning around the same time as the websites reported outages.

However, the company did not immediately reveal what triggered its network problems.

'We are working to analyze and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly,' Cloudflare said on its system status page.

Downdetector users have reported issues with Cloudflare, citing problems with server connection, the Domain Name System (DNS), which translates human-readable domain names to machine-readable IP addresses, and the dashboard.

Issues began around 6.40am ET, affecting a range of services including Apple Pay, DoorDash, Reddit and Hulu streaming service, according to Downdetector, which monitors online outages

Dozens of popular websites crashed on Friday, possibly leaving millions without access

The Daily Mail has contacted Cloudflare for comment.

This is a developing story... More updates to come.