Several major online platforms experienced significant disruptions on Tuesday, November 18, leaving thousands of Nigerian users unable to access popular services including X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT.
Widespread Service Disruption Hits Nigerian Internet Users
The technical problems began shortly after 11:30 GMT, according to outage tracking service Downdetector. Thousands of users across Nigeria reported difficulties accessing multiple platforms that form part of their daily digital routine.
Cloudflare, a global internet infrastructure provider, quickly acknowledged the issue in an official statement. The company confirmed it had detected "a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare's services beginning at 11:20 UTC" which resulted in widespread error messages for traffic passing through its systems.
Engineers at the company were described as being "all hands-on deck" to resolve the problem and ensure all traffic could be served without errors, though the source of the unusual traffic remained unknown during the initial investigation.
User Experiences and Error Messages
On X (Twitter), Nigerian users encountered messages indicating internal server problems linked to an error originating from Cloudflare. ChatGPT users faced similar challenges, with many receiving notifications reading: "please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed."
The irony wasn't lost on many when Downdetector itself briefly displayed connection errors as frustrated users attempted to access outage information during the disruption.
As services slowly began to stabilize, Cloudflare announced it had deployed a fix that restored functionality to its dashboard. However, the company warned that some users might still experience intermittent issues while remediation efforts continued.
Broader Implications for Internet Reliability
Cloudflare provides a wide range of internet security and performance services globally, including bot detection, traffic filtering, and DDoS protection. The company states that 20% of all websites rely on its infrastructure, making this outage particularly far-reaching for Nigerian businesses and individual users alike.
Alp Toker, director of internet-monitoring organisation NetBlocks, described the incident as "a catastrophic disruption to Cloudflare's infrastructure" and highlighted how deeply much of the internet has become dependent on Cloudflare to guard against cyberattacks.
Cybersecurity expert Jake Moore of ESET noted that the incident underscored the risks of over-concentration among major internet service providers. "The outages we have witnessed these last few months have once again highlighted the reliance on these fragile networks," he observed. "Companies often have little choice but to depend heavily on Cloudflare, Microsoft, and Amazon for hosting and security, because there simply aren't many alternatives."
This outage comes just weeks after major disruptions affected Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, each of which temporarily knocked hundreds of websites and apps offline, raising serious questions about the resilience of Nigeria's increasingly digital economy.
