Cloudflare Outage Knocks Major Websites Offline Worldwide

Global disruption triggers 500 errors, affects social platforms, news sites, and even outage-tracking services

A major outage at content delivery network provider Cloudflare caused widespread disruptions across multiple regions on Tuesday, taking several high-traffic websites offline and briefly knocking out Downdetector, the service that usually reports such failures.

The incident began around 1:30pm SAST and quickly spread across South Africa and parts of Europe, with users encountering 500 error messages, a generic server error indicating that websites were unable to process requests.

Cloudflare confirmed the problem on its network and said engineers were investigating the cause. “We are aware of and are investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers,” the company posted on its status page, adding that its Cloudflare Dashboard and API were also failing.

“We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem,” the statement said.

The outage affected a long list of international and local platforms. Elon Musk’s social media network was briefly unreachable, while several Nigerian news outlets, also experienced downtime as the disruption rippled across the provider’s global infrastructure.

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Cloudflare is one of the world’s most widely used CDNs, providing security, traffic routing, and speed optimization for millions of websites. Outages of this scale are rare but tend to trigger immediate, broad-based disruptions, given the service’s centrality to the modern web.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Cloudflare said remediation efforts were ongoing, with services gradually returning for some users.