A major internal network issue at Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest web infrastructure companies, caused global disruption on Tuesday, leading to widespread 500 errors that temporarily crippled vital online platforms including X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT.
The outage, which was reported in multiple regions worldwide and severely impacted the ability of Nigerians to access news updates, financial services, and e-commerce portals, has since seen services begin to recover, though intermittent errors persist.
Cloudflare confirmed it had identified the issue, which it initially reported as an “internal service degradation,” stating: “Cloudflare is aware of and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers.
We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem.
We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
Local Impact and Service Failures
According to findings, the network disruption created slow loading times and downtime for several Nigerian websites that rely on Cloudflare’s network for performance and security.
Major digital services affected globally and locally included:
- X (formerly Twitter): Users reported the platform was largely inaccessible, with feeds failing to load.
- ChatGPT and other AI-driven platforms: Experienced significant access issues.
- Nigerian Websites: News media outlets and e-commerce platforms saw slow loading times and intermittent downtime.
Underscoring Internet Dependency
The incident highlights the critical reliance of the modern internet on a handful of large-scale content delivery networks (CDNs) like Cloudflare, which provides security, traffic management, and performance services to nearly 20% of all websites globally.
This outage is the third major disruption to hit a prominent cloud provider in recent months. Last month, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage that affected over 1,000 sites. Just a week later, Microsoft Azure went down globally, forcing the company to deploy its “last known good” configuration to restore services.
