Major web infrastructure company Cloudflare is currently grappling with a significant network issue that has triggered widespread disruptions globally, including a noticeable impact across Nigeria.
The incident has resulted in "Widespread 500 errors," affecting numerous websites, company dashboards, and application programming interfaces (APIs). The company has confirmed it is investigating the problem while scheduled maintenance is in progress.
Company Confirms Investigation
“Cloudflare is aware of and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing. We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly. Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary.”
Impact Felt Across Nigerian Digital Services
Findings indicate that numerous Nigerian websites relying on Cloudflare's network are experiencing downtime or severe slow loading times. This disruption has hampered the ability of local users to access critical services, including:
Social Media: X (formerly Twitter) users reported the platform was largely inaccessible, with posts failing to load on both mobile and web versions.
AI Platforms: Access issues were reported with ChatGPT and other AI-driven services.
Local Services: Nigerian news media outlets and e-commerce platforms also reported slow loading and inaccessibility.
The outage highlights the deep dependency of the modern internet on large-scale content delivery networks (CDNs) like Cloudflare, which provides services to approximately 20 percent of all global websites.
A Pattern of Disruptions
This is not the first major disruption to affect the global cloud infrastructure recently. The Cloudflare outage follows a series of high-profile incidents involving other major providers:
Amazon Web Services (AWS): Last month, an AWS outage affected over 1,000 sites, from banking apps to gaming services.
Microsoft Azure: On October 29, 2025, Microsoft Azure experienced a global outage that lasted several hours before a full recovery was achieved by deploying a “last known good” configuration.
Cloudflare, which helps websites manage traffic and prevent attacks, has also faced previous outages, further exposing the fragility of external and internal systems that underpin the global web.
The company has promised to provide updates as its investigation and mitigation efforts continue.