What is this?

[BippertyBopperty]

Every time I try and load up Mumsnet from my phone it’s giving me a weird orange loading screen. Is it some kind of virus? I’ve stopped trying to access through my iPhone. It seems the only site that is affected is Mumsnet.

Yes I’ve had this for the first time too tonight on my mobile phone - used Mumsnet earlier today without this happening.....

Hi all, in common with lots of other websites, Mumsnet uses a company called "Cloudflare" to help manage its web traffic and the incoming demand for page views. Sometimes in response to (for example) a sudden spike in the number of page requests we get, they throw up a page like this, which is checking that the request likely to be from a real person rather than some automated process like a scraper or a "bot."

The reason websites do this is that they are open to the public (of course) and it's relatively easy for a person with the relevant skills to write a script to request very many pages very very quickly. That in turn can put a strain on our resources and make the site slower for everyone, or even make it stop working for a while. Cloudflare's service is one of the ways websites try to guard against that.