A widespread internet disruption hit several major platforms on Tuesday after Cloudflare, a leading web infrastructure provider, suffered a massive outage. The incident temporarily brought down services including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Canva, and multiple Nigerian news websites such as Premium Times, PUNCH, Nairametrics, The Nation, and TheCable.
Cloudflare, which provides security and Content Delivery Network (CDN) services for millions of websites globally, experienced an internal failure that prevented users from accessing various platforms. Affected users reported being unable to refresh feeds, log in, or load websites on both mobile and desktop.
Downdetector recorded a surge in complaints early Tuesday, with many noting that X and other services suddenly became unreachable.
Several Nigerian media sites displayed an internal server error linked to Cloudflare’s network during checks.
Cloudflare confirmed the issue, stating that it was experiencing “internal service degradation” that caused intermittent outages across its systems. The company later reported that services were beginning to recover but warned that users might still encounter elevated error rates as remediation continued.
According to Cloudflare, its Access and WARP services were among the first to stabilize, though restoration of other services was still in progress.
By around 2:00 p.m. WAT, previously inaccessible platforms—including X, Canva, and ChatGPT—had started returning to normal operations.
This outage comes just weeks after a major disruption caused by an Amazon Web Services (AWS) fault that affected global platforms such as Snapchat, Roblox, and ChatGPT. That incident originated from a DNS resolution problem in AWS’s US-East-1 region and triggered widespread downtime across multiple services.
Both incidents highlight the growing dependence of global businesses and digital platforms on a small number of major cloud and infrastructure providers.
