‘We failed our customers’ — Cloudflare says global internet disruption not caused by attack

Cloudflare, a web infrastructure firm, says the widespread internet disruption experienced on Tuesday was not the result of an attack but an issue within its own network.

Earlier, websites of big companies around the world, including X (formerly known as Twitter), OpenAI, Canva, and Spotify, experienced a downtime.

The technical glitch also affected access to major Nigerian news sites like TheCable, Premium Times, Nairametrics, PUNCH, and The Nation, among others.

In a post on X, Dane Knecht, the company’s chief technology officer (CTO), apologised for the disruption, saying that Cloudflare had “failed our customers and the broader internet”.

Knecht said a problem within the network disrupted large amounts of traffic flowing through Cloudflare’s infrastructure, affecting the websites, businesses and organisations that depend on its services.

“The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused,” the post reads.

“Transparency about what happened matters, and we plan to share a breakdown with more details in a few hours. In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made.

“That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack.”

The CTO described the outage and the time it took to resolve it as “unacceptable,” noting that Cloudflare has begun work to prevent a recurrence.

“The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most and we are going to do what it takes to earn that back,” he added.

Sharing an update on service recovery, Knecht said traffic flowing through its network was restored by approximately 14:30 UTC, which was the top priority.

However, he said additional work was required to fully restore the control plane — including Cloudflare’s dashboard and APIs used by customers to configure services.

“The control plane should now be fully available. We are monitoring those services and continuing to ensure that everything is fully operational,” the CTO added.

Knecht said the company will share a complete walkthrough of the incident in the coming hours, including what went wrong and the measures being taken to prevent a similar disruption in the future.