Major global websites suffer outages following Cloudflare technical glitch

Several major websites across the world including X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI, Canva, and Spotify experienced significant downtime on Tuesday due to widespread technical issues linked to Cloudflare, a leading web infrastructure and security company.

The disruption began earlier in the morning, with thousands of users reporting difficulties accessing various platforms on Downdetector, an online outage-tracking service. The issue rapidly escalated, affecting multiple high-traffic sites that rely on Cloudflare’s network services.

The technical glitch is also affecting access to major Nigerian news sites like Premium Times, Nairametrics, PUNCH, The Nation, TheCable, among others.

An error message stating that “there’s an internal server error on Cloudflare’s network”, was displayed on the websites of the aforementioned media companies following a check by our reporter.

Cloudflare acknowledged the downtime, stating on its website that it “is experiencing an internal service degradation”.

“Some services may be intermittently impacted,” the internet infrastructure firm said.

“We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly.”

The company, 33 minutes later, reported that they were “seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts”.

As at 1:43 pm local time, it was observed that X, previously inaccessible earlier in the day, is now working.

“We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover,” the company’s latest update said.

“Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates.

“We are continuing to work towards restoring other services.”

Some Nigerian websites, as at 3:13 pm, are still not working.