Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming apps. It provides a unified, scalable, and durable platform for handling real-time data feeds. Kafka works by accepting streams of records from one or more producers and organizing them into topics. It allows both storing and forwarding of these streams to consumers. Producers write data to topics which are replicated across clusters for fault tolerance. Consumers can then read the data from the topics in the order it was produced. Major companies like LinkedIn, Yahoo, Twitter, and Netflix use Kafka for applications like metrics, logging, stream processing and more.