UK-Based Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Major Websites Globally, Hits Ghanaian News Portals
UK-based internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare suffered a major outage on Tuesday, disrupting access to several high-profile websites across the world and affecting major news outlets and digital platforms in Ghana.
Among the affected local websites were Citinewsroom, 3news Online and AmeyawDebrah.com, all of which experienced downtime as Cloudflare’s network issues rippled across multiple regions.
Globally, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, e-commerce platform Shopify and Elon Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter) were also impacted, according to outage tracker Downdetector — which itself was inaccessible to some users during the disruption.
OpenAI reported that both ChatGPT and its Sora short-form video app were experiencing service interruptions tied to “an issue with one of our third-party service providers.”
Cloudflare, in an initial statement, said it detected a “spike in unusual traffic” to one of its core services at around 6:20 a.m. ET, resulting in intermittent errors for traffic routed through its network.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” a spokesperson said. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
The company later noted at 8:35 a.m. ET that it was “continuing to work on restoring service” across affected systems.
Cloudflare underpins roughly 20% of global internet traffic, offering infrastructure and security tools that protect websites against threats such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Its wide reach means disruptions often have far-reaching consequences for businesses and users.
Shares of Cloudflare dropped more than 5% in premarket trading following news of the outage.
The incident comes on the heels of a series of major cloud-related disruptions in recent months. In late October, Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a daylong outage that affected multiple online services, followed weeks later by a global blackout of Microsoft’s Azure cloud and 365 services. In July 2024, a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered one of the most disruptive IT outages in recent history, grounding flights, delaying hospital procedures and impacting financial systems.
Cloudflare says investigations into the cause of the latest outage are ongoing.
