Cloudflare outage disrupts websites worldwide, including Nigeria

A number of global websites, including social media platform X, experienced disruptions on Tuesday following issues linked to internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare.

Cloudflare, in an update posted on its service status page on Tuesday, confirmed it was investigating “an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers”, adding that more information would be released as it becomes available.

It reads, “Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly.

“We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”

Also in Nigeria, several major news websites, including Vanguard, also experienced intermittent downtime.

Cloudflare provides critical backend services for millions of websites worldwide, including security checks and traffic management, and says about 20 per cent of all global websites rely on its infrastructure.

Although the full scale of the outage remains unclear, users also reported difficulties accessing other major platforms, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT. OpenAI said it was reviewing the issue but did not explicitly attribute the disruption to Cloudflare.

Tuesday’s incident comes weeks after a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage knocked more than 1,000 websites and applications offline. Microsoft Azure also suffered service interruptions shortly after the AWS incident.