The outage temporarily took down access to major global platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI, Canva, and Spotify. In Nigeria, leading news outlets such as TheCable, Premium Times, Nairametrics, PUNCH, and The Nation were also affected.
Gatekeepers News reports that Dane Knecht, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer (CTO), apologised in a post on X, acknowledging that the firm had “failed our customers and the broader internet”.
Knecht explained that a problem within Cloudflare’s network disrupted large volumes of traffic flowing through its infrastructure, impacting 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,” he said.
He added that the disruption was triggered by “a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability” that began to crash after a routine configuration change.
“That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack,” Knecht clarified.
Describing both the outage and the recovery time as “unacceptable,” the CTO said Cloudflare has begun implementing measures 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.
Knecht said traffic through Cloudflare’s network was restored by approximately 14:30 UTC, which was the company’s immediate priority. However, he noted that additional work was needed to fully restore the control plane — including Cloudflare’s dashboard and APIs used by customers to configure their services.
“The control plane should now be fully available. We are monitoring those services and continuing to ensure that everything is fully operational,” he said.
Cloudflare plans to publish a detailed walkthrough of the incident in the coming hours, outlining what went wrong and the steps being taken to prevent similar disruptions in the future.
