A major slice of the internet’s hidden backbone faltered on Tuesday after Cloudflare, the US firm shielding millions of websites from cyberattacks, suffered a global outage triggered by a still-unexplained surge in traffic.
The disruption left users worldwide staring at error messages, with several high-profile platforms, including X and OpenAI, recording increased downtime in the same window, according to Downdetector.
Some website owners were also unable to log into their performance dashboards, deepening the frustration.
Cloudflare confirmed that the issue began at 11:20am GMT, when engineers detected a “spike in unusual traffic” hitting one of its key services.
The flood caused errors across parts of its global network, though the company stressed that most traffic continued to flow normally.
“We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors,” a spokesperson said, adding that the cause of the traffic surge remains unknown.
By 12:21pm GMT, Cloudflare reported signs of recovery but warned that users might still encounter elevated error rates as remediation continued. The company later noted that it had disabled its Warp encryption service in London as part of the fix, meaning users there could not connect through Warp.
Cloudflare engineers had planned routine maintenance on datacentres in Tahiti, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Santiago on Tuesday, though it remains unclear whether that played any role in the outage.
Often described as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of”, Cloudflare sits quietly beneath the surface of the modern internet, safeguarding websites, apps and APIs while boosting online performance. Tuesday’s incident served as a reminder of just how visible its absence can become.
The technical glitch disrupted access to major Nigerian news platforms such as Punch, Premium Times, The Nation, TheCable, and others, while Chronicle NG remained unaffected. As of 6:13 p.m., several Nigerian websites were still inaccessible.
