A global internet disruption that temporarily knocked some of the world’s biggest platforms offline — including X, OpenAI, Spotify, Canva, and several top Nigerian news outlets — was caused by an internal failure within Cloudflare’s network, not a cyberattack.
Okay News reports that the outage affected millions of users worldwide before traffic gradually returned to normal.
In a statement posted on X, Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht apologised for the widespread downtime, admitting that the company had “failed our customers and the broader internet.”
According to Knecht, the disruption stemmed from “a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability” that began to crash after a routine configuration update — triggering a chain reaction that degraded the firm’s infrastructure globally.
“This was not an attack,” he wrote. “The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused.”
The outage temporarily crippled access to major Nigerian websites, including TheCable, Premium Times, Nairametrics, PUNCH, The Nation, and Okay News, leaving many users unable to reach essential news and business services.
Knecht described both the scale of the outage and the time required to fix it as “unacceptable,” adding that Cloudflare had begun implementing safeguards to prevent a recurrence.
He confirmed that by 14:30 UTC, traffic flowing through Cloudflare’s network had been restored — the company’s top priority during the incident. However, the control plane, which includes its dashboard and customer API tools, required additional work before returning fully online.
“The control plane should now be fully available. We are monitoring those services and continuing to ensure that everything is fully operational,” Knecht said.
Cloudflare added that it will release a full technical breakdown in the coming hours, detailing what went wrong and the long-term fixes being developed to strengthen stability across its systems.
