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… X, news sites, others go dark
A major internet disruption hit parts of the world on Tuesday, disrupting access to several websites and online platforms including major Nigerian news outlets such as The Sun Nigeria, The Guardian Nigeria, Punch, BusinessDay amongst others.
The outage was linked to a global network issue involving Cloudflare, a leading internet infrastructure and security company whose services support millions of websites worldwide. The company confirmed it was investigating a global network outage that resulted in widespread 500 Internal Server Error messages across the internet.
According to international reports, platforms including ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), Zoom and other major online services also experienced disruptions connected to the Cloudflare network failure.
The Guardian UK reported that Cloudflare was examining issues across several data centres following user complaints of inaccessible websites and system errors.
In Nigeria, the outage caused temporary shutdowns or loading failures on several prominent media websites. Users attempting to access The Sun, The Guardian Nigeria, and BusinessDay encountered error messages or blank pages for several minutes.
Newsrooms relying on digital-first publishing also reported delays in uploading stories as website dashboards and content management systems became unreachable.
Digital editors in Lagos and Abuja said they initially suspected local server issues until global reports confirmed a widespread disruption. The failure triggered a spike in downtime reports worldwide, with monitoring platforms registering outages across Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Tech analysts noted that, because Cloudflare handles traffic routing and security for many websites, a single infrastructure issue can have worldwide consequences.
While Cloudflare has not confirmed the cause of the disruption, the company said services were gradually recovering as of mid-day Tuesday. It did not indicate whether ongoing scheduled maintenance in several data centres was related to the outage.
Cloudflare acknowledged the incident, saying engineers were actively working to “identify and resolve” the problem. The company also confirmed that some users would continue experiencing elevated error rates as systems stabilised.
By late afternoon, several Nigerian news websites began loading normally again, though some pages still showed intermittent delays.
The incident highlighted the dependence of Nigerian digital media and businesses on global internet infrastructure, raising renewed concerns about redundancy and resilience.
Cloudflare is expected to issue a full technical report once investigations are complete.
