Cloudflare has explained the cause of the massive global outage that affected major platforms such as X (Twitter), ChatGPT, banking services, and several Nigerian websites. According to the company, the disruption was triggered by a critical issue in its data routing system, which led to widespread traffic failures across multiple regions at the same time. This glitch caused websites and apps that rely on Cloudflare’s network to slow down drastically or go completely offline.

The outage, which lasted for hours, affected millions of users worldwide. Cloudflare said the problem began when an update meant to improve system performance unexpectedly created a configuration error, disrupting normal operations. Because so many global services depend on Cloudflare for security and content delivery, the error spread rapidly and caused a chain reaction across different sectors — social media, AI platforms, fintech apps, government portals, and e-commerce platforms.

Technical teams at Cloudflare immediately began working to isolate the problem. They rolled back the faulty update, restored normal routing paths, and stabilised affected servers. The company added that there was no cyberattack or hack, and the outage was purely a system failure caused by internal changes. While services have largely returned to normal, Cloudflare acknowledged that the incident exposed how dependent the world is on its infrastructure.

Experts say the outage highlights an important lesson: a single point of failure in global internet infrastructure can disrupt billions of users. They advise companies to strengthen their backup systems and diversify dependency on cloud networks. Cloudflare, on its part, says it will conduct a full internal review to prevent such disruptions in the future.