Mbabane – A major widespread failure at the key internet infrastructure provider, Cloudflare, has left millions globally, including users in the Kingdom, unable to access essential online platforms such as the AI chatbot ChatGPT, the social media site X, and even Facebook.
The critical disruption created friction for local businesses, students, and government officials from Mbabane to Manzini who rely on these global tools for daily operations.
The extensive service degradation began around mid-day local time (approximately 12:00 PM SAST) on Tuesday when Cloudflare’s system, which manages content delivery and security for a significant portion of the internet, experienced major internal errors. Cloudflare confirmed it suffered “widespread 500 errors,” meaning its servers encountered an unexpected condition that prevented them from fulfilling user requests.
The company, which acts as a crucial layer between users and countless websites, reported that the issue rapidly escalated from a problem concerning a support portal provider into a broader network failure. This was an upstream network failure, not an error on the individual platforms themselves, explaining why so many services collapsed simultaneously.
For users attempting to use ChatGPT, which accounts for about 90 percent of the complaints tracked globally, the experience involved unexpected disconnections, session failures, and an inability to get responses. Tracking data showed the errors spiked well above the platform’s normal operational baseline.
Cybersecurity experts warned that such heavy reliance on single global points of failure, following similar incidents recently seen with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, poses a major risk. Graeme Stewart, head of public sector at cybersecurity company Check Point, noted that the problem was not that each organisation failed on its own, but that the single layer they all depend on stopped responding, making it a critical cybersecurity concern.
Cloudflare has since stated it had to temporarily disable certain services, including Cloudflare Access and WARP, in some areas as part of its efforts to restore service. The company is continuing its work to achieve full stability across its network. OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has not yet issued a public statement confirming Cloudflare as the source of its service interruption.
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