A major outage at internet-infrastructure firm Cloudflare on Tuesday morning paralysed access to large swathes of the web, knocking popular services offline and causing slow-downs and error pages for millions of users, including many in Nigeria.
The disruption began in the early hours of the day and forced Cloudflare to flag an “internal service degradation” while engineers worked to restore normal traffic.
Cloudflare, which handles traffic for roughly one in five websites globally, reported the incident on its status page as an internal degradation that began shortly before 11:20 UTC.
The company said it was investigating unusual traffic patterns that coincided with rising error rates, and warned customers that elevated 500-class errors may persist while remediation continued.
Major platforms that rely on Cloudflare’s edge network, including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Canva, Spotify and other services, displayed widespread failures or slow loading times as the problem rippled through the internet.
The outage’s impact was felt across regions. Nigerian newsrooms and e-commerce sites reported intermittent downtime or sluggish pages as Cloudflare’s network problems propagated to customer sites that use its DNS, CDN and security services.
Local technology outlets and web admins told reporters they saw page-load failures and 500 errors when attempting to reach services that pass traffic through Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
The incident briefly rendered outage-tracking services such as Downdetector unreliable, compounding confusion for users trying to confirm the scale of the disruption.
Industry analysts said the episode underlines a growing fragility in the modern internet: a handful of companies provide centralised routing, security and caching services, so faults at those providers can cascade quickly.
Cloudflare’s platform is especially pervasive because it sits between end users and millions of websites, accelerating traffic and shielding sites from attacks.
When its control plane or routing systems experience trouble, affected customers often see immediate access failures across multiple regions.
Cybersecurity experts stressed that although the immediate cause appeared to be a surge of unusual traffic rather than a direct attack, the situation demonstrates how dependent the web has become on a small number of critical intermediaries.
Cloudflare said engineers had deployed mitigations and that many services were returning to normal by mid-morning, but warned residual errors could linger as systems stabilised.
Platform owners and Nigerian web operators were urged to monitor their dashboards and contingency arrangements, including secondary DNS and multi-provider setups, to reduce single-point failures in future. Several affected services issued their own updates as normal traffic resumed.
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