A global service disruption at Cloudflare today left several leading Nigerian news websites inaccessible for hours, triggering widespread complaints from readers and raising fresh concerns over the dependence of local publishers on foreign digital infrastructure.

The affected platforms include The Punch, Vanguard, Tribune, and The Sun, all of which rely on Cloudflare’s content delivery and security architecture to keep their websites running smoothly.

Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest content delivery network (CDN) and DNS providers, confirmed the incident on Tuesday, stating that its global network was “experiencing issues” and that engineers were working to restore normal traffic flow.

Users across multiple countries also reported difficulties accessing major platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, and Spotify, all believed to have been hit by the same disruption.

Some ChatGPT users were greeted with an error message asking them to “unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed.”

Although the exact cause of the outage remains unknown, Cloudflare attributed the disruption to a spike in “unusual traffic,” noting that its teams were fully mobilised to stabilise the system.

Cloudflare powers nearly 20 per cent of all websites worldwide, though the number of Nigerian sites affected by today’s downtime remains uncertain.

Digital analysts warn that the incident highlights the vulnerability of online businesses that depend heavily on international service providers for content delivery and cybersecurity functions.