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Good afternoon, you fine humans! We hope you had a lovely weekend. Christine is off on a well-deserved holiday, and I’m going to be working on some special projects for a few weeks (including my tan and my surfing skills), so starting tomorrow, we will leave this fair newsletter in the capable hands of Kyle. Give the man a follow on Twitter — you’ve seen a ton of his writing linked to from this newsletter, and I love his writing in general, so you’ll have a blast.

Oh, and if you wanna come hang out in person, we only have, like, 50 tickets left to our summer party. Come hang out and be jolly!

Oh, and if you wanna brighten your day and mine — let’s go mad with cat gifs on my Twitter account. Go on, let’s have a little cat-gif sharing party. — Haje 

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Oh dear, who tripped over the wire again? Cloudflare is a cornerstone of the internet, which is reassuring and lovely, until it all falls apart. A huge number of services, including Discord, DoorDash, Crunchyroll, NordVPN and others had significant outages when Cloudflare took a dirt nap for a few hours. Things should be up and whirring again now, and no doubt the Cloudflare ops teams will have a couple of intense weeks figuring out what happened and how to prevent it in the future, Manish writes.

• The <?= ordinal($cutcounter++); ?> cut is the deepest: Klarna is reportedly considering raising at a $15 billion valuation — a huge haircut from its mid-2021 $45 billion valuation. Over on our subscription product TechCrunch Plus, Alex makes it make (more) sense.

• LeadSquared grows a unicorn horn: Manish reports that LeadSquared raised $153 million in a Series C funding round that valued it at $1 billion. The round was led by Westbridge Capital, and the startup is now looking to broaden its product with new features, including sales performance analytics and a suite of tools to digitize application processing.