A widespread internet disruption on Tuesday, November 18, sparked outages across several major websites and social media platforms, including X, after global internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare experienced technical problems.
Thousands of users flagged difficulties accessing X and other platforms on Downdetector, with major Nigerian news websites also affected.
Cloudflare acknowledged the incident in a note posted on its service status dashboard, saying, “Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers.”
The company added, “Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”
In a later update, Cloudflare said systems were gradually stabilising, explaining that it was “seeing services recover” but warning that customers “may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
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The update indicates that some platforms may still face intermittent problems as Cloudflare works to fully resolve the technical issues.
Cloudflare is one of the world’s biggest internet security providers, handling tasks such as filtering bot traffic and securing connections.
The company says its services support about 20 per cent of all websites globally.
It remains unclear how many sites were disrupted by the outage or the full scale of its impact.
However, users also reported difficulties accessing other major platforms, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Experts say the incident underscores how heavily the modern internet depends on a small number of infrastructure companies, and how disruptions within them can ripple quickly across the digital world.