Cloudfare is a global internet infrastructure and security company.
Cloudflare has suffered an outage that caused widespread disruption across the internet, affecting major global platforms, as well as sites and users in South Africa.
Cloudflare is a global internet infrastructure and security company that helps websites run faster, stay online and protected from cyber attacks.
The issue began late morning UTC, when Cloudflare reported an internal service failure that triggered 500-error messages and prevented many websites from loading.
The ripple effect was immediate, as services such as X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, and numerous local and international sites became slow, unstable, or completely inaccessible.
Although Cloudflare later confirmed that recovery was underway, elevated error rates continued for some time, highlighting just how dependent the modern internet is on a few critical infrastructure providers.
“Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate,” said the company when providing a system update earlier today.
In a later update, it said: “We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates. We have re-enabled WARP access in London.”
The Cloudflare outage follows on the heels the Amazon Web Services (AWS) blackout which affected global users last month.
Lionel Dartnall, country manager for SADC at Check Point Software Technologies, comments that Cloudflare going down today sits in the same pattern seen with the recent AWS and Azure outages.
“These platforms are vast, efficient and used by almost every part of modern life. The upside is obvious. Their scale keeps costs low, makes security tools more accessible and gives even small organisations the kind of performance that would once have been impossible. The downside is just as clear. When a platform of this size slips, the impact spreads far and fast, and everyone feels it at once.”
Dartnall says during today’s outage, news sites, payments, public information pages and community services all froze.
He explains that this was not because each organisation failed on its own. “It was because a single layer they all rely on stopped responding. People saw a simple error page, but the break reached into the systems that hold up essential services.”
From a cyber security view, this is the part that matters, he warns. “Any platform that carries this much of the world’s traffic becomes a target.
“Even an accidental outage creates noise and uncertainty that attackers know how to use. If an incident of this scale were triggered deliberately, the disruption would spread across countries that use these platforms to communicate with the public and deliver basic services.
“Many organisations still run everything through one route with no meaningful backup. When that route fails, there is no fallback. That is the weakness we keep seeing play out. The internet was meant to be resilient through distribution, yet we have ended up concentrating huge amounts of global traffic into a handful of cloud providers.”
According to Dartnall, large platforms bring benefits, but events like today show the cost of that decision. “Until there is real diversity and redundancy in the system, each outage will hit people harder than it should,” he concludes.
