Cloudflare, the global service provider that helps websites secure and manage internet traffic, reported a significant issue with its network early Tuesday, causing widespread disruptions for numerous websites and apps worldwide. The outage also affected several prominent services in Pakistan, including Profit, along with several other news websites, which experienced downtime lasting over an hour.
Cloudflare issued a status update at around 5 pm. acknowledging the disruption, stating, “We are aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers.” The company assured users that it was working to mitigate the problem and fully understand its impact.
About 20 minutes later, Cloudflare reported that disruptions were easing, but continued to monitor the situation. By 6:15 pm., the company confirmed that error levels for some of its services had “returned to pre-incident rates” but emphasised that some services were still being restored.
The outage affected a range of online platforms, including popular social media sites like X (formerly Twitter), the online gaming service League of Legends, as well as global platforms like Spotify, Amazon, and OpenAI, which were also hit by connectivity issues, according to DownDetector, an outage tracking website.
This incident comes just weeks after Amazon Web Services (AWS) faced a similar disruption that impacted various online services for several hours. Cloudflare, known for its tools that protect websites from cyberattacks and optimize content delivery, is yet to provide full details on the extent of the damage caused by this latest disruption.
In Pakistan, the downtime disrupted access to critical news and online services for many users, highlighting the vulnerability of the digital infrastructure to global outages.
