KUALA LUMPUR (Nov 18): A major Cloudflare outage on Tuesday evening disrupted access to numerous websites worldwide, with platforms including The Edge Malaysia’s portal experiencing intermittent downtime.

The disruption, which began shortly before 8pm local time, resulted in widespread 500 errors and inaccessible web pages for users attempting to access sites routed through Cloudflare’s global network. Major platforms reportedly affected included X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT/OpenAI, Spotify, Canva and Bursa Malaysia's website.

Cloudflare said it was investigating what it described as a “global network” issue affecting multiple customers.

In its latest status update at 12.37pm UTC (8.37pm Malaysia time), the company said it was “continuing to investigate this issue”.

Earlier, Cloudflare reported signs of service recovery but warned that users could still experience elevated error rates as remediation efforts continued.

The company first acknowledged the problem at 11.48am UTC (7.48pm Malaysia time), saying it was aware of “widespread 500 errors”, with the Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing.

It added that it was working to understand the full impact and mitigate the outage.

A subsequent update revised its description of the incident, stating that Cloudflare was experiencing “an internal service degradation”, with some services intermittently affected.

The outage led to loading failures across numerous global platforms, underscoring Cloudflare’s role as a core infrastructure provider that sits behind a large share of the modern internet.

In general, Cloudflare provides content delivery, security protection and traffic routing services that help keep websites online, absorb cyberattacks and manage high volumes of web traffic.

Tracking site Down Detector, which monitors real-time outages, also experienced disruptions as the Cloudflare incident unfolded.