By: ThinkBusiness Africa
Internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare experienced a significant global outage on Tuesday, sending shockwaves across the digital world and causing widespread accessibility issues for major platforms, including those heavily relied upon by users in Nigeria.
The disruption was characterized by widespread “HTTP 500 Internal Server Errors.”
Cloudflare, a key provider of Content Delivery Network (CDN), security, and DDoS protection services, confirmed the issue, which began in the morning hours and quickly affected thousands of customer websites across North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
According to updates from Cloudflare’s status page, the company began investigating an “internal service degradation” that impacted multiple customers. The company later confirmed that the issue was identified and a fix was being implemented.
Global access to X (formerly Twitter) was heavily disrupted, with users unable to load timelines or post content.
ChatGPT and other platforms from OpenAI became largely inaccessible, often displaying error messages.
Spotify, Canva, Shopify, and the online game League of Legends were among the dozens of popular services that reported significant connection failures.
The global outage had a palpable effect on the Nigerian digital ecosystem, disrupting everything from financial services to news consumption. As Cloudflare sits in front of numerous local websites to enhance speed and security, the service failure translated directly into downtime and painfully slow loading times for many Nigerian platforms.
Users attempting to access local news media outlets, e-commerce portals, and even some government services that utilize Cloudflare’s network infrastructure reported experiencing the same disruptive 500 error messages. The inaccessibility of major global platforms like X (twitter) and ChatGPT further hampered professional and personal communication across the country.
Cloudflare has been providing real-time updates, indicating that services are recovering, although customers may still experience “higher-than-normal error rates” as remediation efforts continue.
