Problems at cloud infrastructure provider Cloudflare caused disruptions to online platforms across the world on Tuesday – and the problem was so bad it took down a website people use to report problems online.
The issues began around 1.30pm SAST and appeared to be impacting websites across Africa, Europe and North America. Even Downdetector, a website that lets users report problems with websites, was briefly unavailable. There were still problems being reported at 4.30pm SAST as Cloudflare worked to recover from the incident, details of which were still not available.
Cloudflare acknowledged it was working to resolve a problem on its global network, posting on its website that it was “aware of and is investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers”.
It said many websites were showing 500 errors – this is a generic hypertext transfer protocol status code that means the website’s server encountered an unexpected problem and could not fulfil a request.
Cloudflare said its Cloudflare Dashboard feature and application programming interface were also failing.
“We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem,” the company said.
Large international and South African websites were impacted by the incident. Elon Musk-owned social media platform X was unavailable as was OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, while major South African news websites, including TechCentral, were also impacted by the problems.
In an update posted at 2.21pm SAST, Cloudflare said: “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
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In a further update at 4.42pm, Cloudflare said the issue had been resolved, but still didn’t disclose any further information about what caused it. “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.” – © 2025 NewsCentral Media
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