The internet is big. The number of companies making it run is small.

From Marketplace, I'm Sabrina Beneshore, in for David Bruncaccio.

Chat, GPTX, Shopify, even the website for New Jersey Transit, among many other pages and apps,

were not working for a few hours yesterday morning because of an outage at the company

Cloudflare. The cybersecurity firm fixed the issue, but it is a reminder that a lot of the

internet relies on a small number of companies to keep things running as Marketplace's Henry

App reports. Like a lot of the tech sector, cybersecurity companies have grown in part by acquiring

other companies. And those few firms protect lots of websites we use every day, says J.B. Branch with

the Consumer Advocacy Group Public Citizen. That means that when there's an outage, like the one that

hit Cloudflare this week. The ripple effect is not just to one website or two.

It's to many websites, and it's not just to one country.

It's throughout the globe.

There are reasons many global platforms, Zoom or X or Uber, rely on bigger cybersecurity firms,

says Alan Woodward, a professor at the University of Surrey in the UK.

Especially if you're a big brand, you're a big name, you go for one of these bigger companies,

because they're the ones that can help you deal with things on a global scale.

And a lot of companies and organizations have decided it's a better deal to pay another

business to handle some of their IT needs rather

than doing it all themselves, says Kevin Cleary at the University at Buffalo School of Management.

Its economy is a scale at the end of the day. We can have a third party that can do it better than we

can for cheaper than we can. The tradeoff, sometimes that third party has a problem.

So Cleary says companies have to ask themselves,

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