Thousands of websites, including Business Post, were down for users on Tuesday due to problems affecting major internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare.
Users began reporting issues with the sites, as well as other services, to outage monitoring site Downdetector around 12:30 p.m. (Nigerian time) on Tuesday.
Cloudflare said in a statement it had seen “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC” which had caused errors for traffic passing through its network.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” it said, adding “we are all hands-on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
Cloudflare is a huge provider of internet security across the world, carrying out services such as checking visitor connections to sites are coming from humans rather than bots.
It says 20 per cent of all websites worldwide use its services in some form.
It is unclear how many of those websites have been affected by this outage, and to what extent.
Another website, Downdetector, which many flock to when sites stop loading or appear to have issues, also displayed an error message as many tried to access it on Tuesday.
Issues affecting Cloudflare’s services come after an outage impacting Amazon Web Services last month saw more than 1,000 sites and apps knocked offline.
Among affected services are: X formerly known as Twitter and ChatGPT.
X is displaying a message for some users saying there is a problem with its internal server, as a result of an “error” originating with Cloudflare.
ChatGPT’s site was also displaying an error message telling some users: “please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed.”
Also affected is Meristem Securities, a Nigerian stockbroking firm, which wrote via email seen but Business Post that, “We want to inform you that due to an ongoing outage, some of our client-facing applications are currently unavailable. This issue is affecting multiple services across the industry, and we are actively monitoring the situation.
“Our team is working closely with the service provider to restore full functionality as quickly as possible. At this time, we do not have an exact resolution timeline, but we will provide updates as soon as more information becomes available.”