A large-scale outage at internet infrastructure company Cloudflare triggered widespread disruptions across multiple online platforms on Tuesday, affecting users globally — including in Pakistan.
Cloudflare, which provides content delivery network (CDN) and domain name server (DNS) services, reported issues across its global network in the late afternoon.
At 5:03pm, the company confirmed it was investigating “widespread 500 errors” and failures impacting its dashboard and API.
By 5:21pm, Cloudflare said some services were beginning to recover, though users could still face “higher-than-normal error rates” as remediation continued.
Global internet watchdog NetBlocks confirmed that several online services were experiencing outages linked to a technical issue within Cloudflare’s network. It emphasised that the disruptions were not related to country-level internet filtering or shutdowns.
In Pakistan, outage tracker Downdetector showed a spike in user reports around 4:10pm, with complaints also appearing for OpenAI, Amazon Web Services and Facebook.
Social platform X (formerly Twitter) was among the major services hit. Downdetector recorded more than 11,500 reports of issues with X in the United States and other regions by 6:41am ET. It remains unclear whether X’s outage was directly linked to Cloudflare’s network problems.
A DNS server functions like an online address book, connecting website names to their actual IP addresses. Large-scale DNS failures can disrupt access to major platforms, as seen on Tuesday.
Cloudflare’s official status page confirmed ongoing disruptions, stating that the company was continuing to assess the full impact. Even Downdetector, which tracks real-time outage reports, experienced difficulties during the incident.
Cloudflare said further updates will be shared as its teams work to fully restore services.