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Joy Agwunobi
Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest content delivery network (CDN) and domain name server (DNS) providers, says it has fully resolved the widespread outage that disrupted access to websites and digital platforms across several continents on Tuesday.
The company confirmed that it implemented a fix late in the evening, restoring connectivity for millions of users affected by the hours-long downtime.
In an update, Cloudflare stated that it had “implemented a fix” and believed the incident “is now resolved,” adding that engineers were “continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.” The update, shared via the company’s status page and cited by Dawn News, came after users worldwide reported an inability to access websites, dashboards, APIs, and digital services relying on Cloudflare’s infrastructure, which handles roughly 20 percent of global web traffic.
Despite the fix, Cloudflare noted that a number of customers might still face difficulties logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard. “We are working on a fix to resolve this, and continuing to monitor for any further issues,” the company said, indicating that residual disruptions were still being addressed.
The outage marked yet another blow to major online platforms in a year defined by frequent and high-impact cloud infrastructure failures. Tuesday’s disruption caused widespread 500 errors across websites and applications, with social media platforms, streaming services, gaming networks, and enterprise tools all affected.
Earlier in the day, Cloudflare had acknowledged experiencing network-wide issues affecting multiple global regions, including Nigeria. The company initially warned that it was investigating “widespread 500 errors,” along with failures on the Cloudflare Dashboard and API. It also noted that scheduled maintenance was underway at the time, though it did not explicitly link the outage to the maintenance activity.
“We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly,” Cloudflare said in its first official communication on the incident.
Nigeria among affected regions
In Nigeria, the outage was immediately felt across digital services, with numerous websites hosted on Cloudflare’s network experiencing downtime or unusually slow loading speeds. News platforms, financial service portals, e-commerce sites, and enterprise dashboards were among the hardest hit, leaving users unable to access basic online services for hours.
Major international platforms were also affected. X (formerly Twitter) recorded widespread accessibility failures, with posts and timelines failing to load on both mobile and web versions; ChatGPT and other AI-powered platforms experienced login and usage disruptions, as well as some local Nigerian news outlets and online marketplaces reported spikes in user complaints as pages failed to load during peak traffic periods.
The incident once again highlighted the deepening dependence of global and local digital ecosystems on large-scale CDNs like Cloudflare, whose infrastructure underpins everything from microblogs to banking platforms.
Part of a growing pattern of cloud instability
Cloudflare’s outage adds to a growing list of cloud disruptions that have rippled through the global digital economy this year. Just last month, Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a major outage that knocked more than 1,000 websites offline, affecting banking applications, ride-hailing services, media platforms, and gaming networks.
Barely a week later, on October 29, 2025, Microsoft Azure experienced a global breakdown that lasted several hours. The full restoration required rolling back to the platform’s “last known good” configuration, a move Microsoft later described as a critical safeguard. The company has since pledged to tighten its validation processes and improve rollback controls to prevent similar failures.
Cloudflare, meanwhile, has faced a series of network interruptions over the past year, some of which have revealed internal vulnerabilities and the extent to which its systems rely on both external and interlinked internal components. Industry analysts say the recurrent outages underline the fragility of global cloud infrastructure, where a single point of failure can disrupt millions of users across continents.
Wider implications for digital resilience
For businesses and users in Nigeria and beyond, Tuesday’s disruption serves as another reminder of the central role cloud networks play in the modern internet. With CDNs like Cloudflare powering a significant share of global web traffic, any technical instability often triggers cascading effects across multiple sectors.
As Cloudflare continues to monitor its systems and roll out additional fixes, analysts warn that the frequency of such outages across major cloud providers raises urgent questions about redundancy, resilience, and the need for stronger safeguards in the global internet backbone.
