US company that defends millions of websites against malicious attacks says it believes issue ‘is now resolved’

• Explainer: What is Cloudflare?

A key piece of the internet’s usually hidden infrastructure suffered a global outage on Tuesday, causing error messages to flash up across websites.

Cloudflare, a US company whose services include defending millions of websites against malicious attacks, experienced an unidentified problem that meant internet users could not access some of its customers’ websites.

Gaming platform to use facial age estimation to limit chats to similar age groups, as allegations of grooming grow

The online games platform Roblox is to start blocking children from talking to adult and much older teen strangers from next month as it faces fresh lawsuits alleging it has been exploited by predators to groom children as young as seven.

Roblox has reached 150 million daily players of games including viral hits Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot but has been hit by legal claims alleging the system’s design has made “children easy prey for paedophiles”.

Former Beatle and artists including Sam Fender, Kate Bush and Hans Zimmer record silent LP Is This What We Want

At two minutes 45 seconds it’s about the same length as With a Little Help From My Friends. But Paul McCartney’s first new recording in five years lacks the sing-along tune and jaunty guitar chops because there’s barely anything there.

The former Beatle, arguably Britain’s greatest living songwriter, is releasing a track of an almost completely silent recording studio as part of a music industry protest against copyright theft by artificial intelligence companies.