Global internet traffic stalls as Cloudflare outage causes widespread disruption
by The Borneo Post Team · Borneo Post OnlineKUCHING (Nov 18): Millions of internet users globally experienced widespread connectivity issues tonight following a significant service disruption at Cloudflare, one of the internet’s primary infrastructure providers.
The outage, which was noticeable around 7.30pm, caused major platforms and local businesses alike to become temporarily inaccessible, displaying generic “Error 500” messages.
Cloudflare acts as a digital intermediary, providing security and accelerating content delivery for approximately one-fifth of the world’s websites.
When its systems failed, the resulting “digital gridlock” immediately affected high-traffic global services like X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Spotify, and Canva.
Locally, the effects were noted across regional websites and services heavily reliant on Cloudflare’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) for speed and security.
Cloudflare confirmed the issue was an “internal service degradation”, later clarifying the root cause was a configuration file designed to manage threat traffic.
This file unexpectedly grew in size, triggering a crash in core software systems. The company assured the public the incident was not the result of a malicious cyberattack.
Engineers worked quickly to implement a fix, and services were largely restored within three hours, though some customers continued to observe intermittent errors throughout the monitoring phase.