By Staff Reporter
KARACHI: Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure company whose network carries roughly 20 percent of global web traffic, said on Tuesday evening that it had resolved a widespread outage that knocked thousands of websites and online services offline for more than two hours and caused cascading disruptions across the internet.
“A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved,” the company said in a status update posted at 7:42 pm Eastern time. “We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”
Cloudflare later added that a small number of customers were still unable to log into or use the company’s dashboard. “We are working on a fix to resolve this, and continuing to monitor for any further issues.”
The outage, which began in the late afternoon Eastern time, produced error messages and 500-level server failures on sites that rely on Cloudflare’s content-delivery network, domain-name-system resolution, and security services. Popular services including Discord, Crunchyroll, and parts of Shopify were among those affected, according to user reports compiled by Downdetector. NetBlocks, an internet-observatory group that tracks global connectivity, confirmed widespread disruptions tied to Cloudflare’s network and emphasised that the incident was not related to “country-level internet disruptions or filtering.”
In Pakistan, where user complaints first spiked around 4:10 pm local time, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said it was monitoring the situation and remained in contact with global platforms and local operators until full restoration. An earlier Cloudflare update, posted at 6:09 pm Eastern, said the company had restored its Cloudflare Access and WARP services and that error rates had returned to normal. Engineers were still working to bring application-services customers fully back online.
The company initially acknowledged the problem shortly after reports surfaced, stating it was “aware of and investigating an issue” that was causing widespread 500 errors and impairing the Cloudflare dashboard and related API services.
Tuesday’s incident was the second major Cloudflare disruption in recent years. In June 2022, a similar “widespread outage” made numerous high-profile sites unreachable for about 90 minutes. Cloudflare operates one of the world’s largest content-delivery networks, routing traffic through data centers on six continents to speed page loads and shield customers from cyberattacks and traffic spikes. When its network falters, the effects are felt broadly because many websites and applications depend on it for basic connectivity and security. The episode follows a string of high-profile internet disruptions this year. Last month an outage at Amazon Web Services left thousands of sites and apps—including Snapchat, Reddit, and IMDb—inaccessible for several hours.
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