If you were frantically refreshing your apps last night wondering, “HELLOOO… what’s wrong with the servers!?”, you were not alone. A bunch of major websites went down yesterday, and people across the UAE were also hit with error messages left, right, and centre
A Cloudflare outage caused widespread internet issues that led social media platforms of X, Canva, ChatGPT and Spotify, among others to have gone down temporarily
The apps started acting up or refused to load at all. In a WhatsApp Poll shared on the Lovin’ Dubai channel, more than 70% users said that they were facing internet issues and almoooost drafted that ‘Work From Home’ request.
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So… what actually happened?
Cloudflare, one of the biggest internet networks that keeps tons of apps safe, fast and stable during heavy traffic, had a moment. And that moment sent the internet into a mini-meltdown mode.
When Cloudflare glitched, platforms like, X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Canva, OpenAI, and Spotify all came down with the traffic.
People lost it (in the funniest way)
As expected out of the internet, everyone jumped online (well… tried) to figure out what broke.
Soon enough, “Cloudflare” was trending everywhere, with memes flying faster than the servers were up running.
Downdetector reported over 5,600+ complaints, before it also got overwhelmed and stopped loading for some users. Imagine the confusion.
However, Cloudflare did respond pretty fast as well. The CEO, Matthew Prince, wrote
“We let the Internet down today.” and shared a technical post mortem on what happened on their blog.
As per the blog:
“The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems’ permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.”
The team also got to resolving the issue:
“we correctly identified the core issue and were able to stop the propagation of the larger-than-expected feature file and replace it with an earlier version of the file. Core traffic was largely flowing as normal by 14:30. We worked over the next few hours to mitigate increased load on various parts of our network as traffic rushed back online. As of 17:06 all systems at Cloudflare were functioning as normal.”
Not the first major outage this year
The outage comes only a month after Amazon’s cloud service outage messed with thousands of websites globally, affecting apps like Snapchat and Reddit. Oh, and not to forget the whole Red Sea Cable drama that had people going on buffer mode for weeks.
2025 really said: Let’s test everyone’s patience with the internet.
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