Islamabad: Internet users worldwide experienced significant disruptions on Tuesday after Cloudflare, a leading content delivery network (CDN) and domain name server (DNS) provider, reported technical issues affecting its global network.
According to Cloudflare, the incident triggered widespread 500 errors, impacting multiple customers, along with failures in its dashboard and API services. In an update at 5:03 pm, the company confirmed it was investigating the problem to understand the full impact and mitigate the issues. A subsequent update at 5:21 pm noted partial recovery, cautioning that customers could still experience elevated error rates as remediation continued.
Global internet watchdog NetBlocks confirmed that several online services, including OpenAI, Amazon Web Services, Facebook, and the social media platform X, were affected, emphasizing that the incident was technical and not related to country-level internet disruptions or censorship.
Downdetector, which tracks outages, reported that users in Pakistan began experiencing issues around 4:10 pm. Thousands of X users, particularly in the United States and globally, also faced service interruptions, with over 11,500 complaints logged by 6:41 am ET.
Experts explained that DNS servers act like an internet “address book,” translating website names into their corresponding IP addresses. A disruption in such servers can have widespread consequences for online connectivity and access to multiple services simultaneously.
As of now, Cloudflare and X have not provided further comments, and service restoration continues globally.