Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest internet infrastructure providers, suffered a major network outage on Tuesday, disrupting access to millions of websites and digital services across multiple regions — including Nigeria.
The disruption triggered widespread 500 errors, bringing down websites, dashboards, and APIs that rely on Cloudflare’s global content delivery network. The company said it is currently investigating the root cause while scheduled maintenance continues.
“Cloudflare is aware of and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing… We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem,” the company said on its status page.
Impact Across Nigeria
According to findings by Nairametrics, a number of Nigerian websites hosted on or routed through Cloudflare experienced downtime or extremely slow load speeds. This made it difficult for users to access news platforms, financial services, and e-commerce sites during the peak of the outage.
Major platforms affected include:
- X (formerly Twitter): Users reported failed loading on both mobile and web.
- ChatGPT and other AI platforms: Intermittent access issues.
- Local media and e-commerce sites: Slow responses and temporary downtime due to the Cloudflare disruption.
The incident highlights Nigeria’s increasing reliance on global infrastructure networks and the ripple effects when a single provider experiences downtime.
A Reminder of the Internet’s Fragile Backbone
The outage adds to a growing list of recent disruptions involving global cloud infrastructure services. Cloudflare, which secures and accelerates roughly 20% of all websites worldwide, has faced a series of outages in recent years that exposed dependencies within its internal systems.
The latest incident follows:
- An AWS outage last month, which knocked offline more than 1,000 platforms — including banking apps and gaming services.
- A Microsoft Azure global outage on October 29, 2025, which lasted several hours and required the company to roll back to its “last known good” configuration.
The scale of Cloudflare’s reach meant that Tuesday’s outage also hit several high-profile consumer platforms. ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify, and Elon Musk’s X all experienced disruptions — just weeks after Musk boasted that X was “fully encrypted with no AWS dependencies” following Amazon’s outage.
Signal President Meredith Whittaker also used the moment to raise concerns about the world’s dependence on just a handful of powerful infrastructure providers, writing:
“The question isn’t ‘why does Signal use AWS?’… It’s to ask how we got to a place where there’s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers.”
Recovery Underway but Not Fully Restored
Cloudflare said the issue had been identified and that engineers were rolling out a fix. As of press time, not all customers have been fully restored, though some platforms are gradually coming back online.
The incident once again underscores the centralized risks of the modern internet, where a single point of failure can cascade across continents — and affects everything from how Nigerians get their news to how global communication platforms stay online.
