Cloudflare Outage Mostly Resolved, But SA Sites and Businesses Still Feeling the Ripples

Cloudflare Outage Mostly Resolved, But Some South African Sites and Businesses Still Feeling the Ripples

Cloudflare has deployed a fix to address a global network outage, but residual effects are still being felt. Several South African sites and businesses that rely on Cloudflare are reportedly experiencing ongoing issues.

According to Cloudflare’s own status updates, the company has restored its dashboard and believes the major incident is resolved, though it continues to monitor for errors.

Here’s the latest timeline from Cloudflare:

• 14:42 UTC Fix implemented; status moved to “monitoring.”

• 14:34 UTC Dashboard services restored, but “broad application services impact” remains.

• 13:13 UTC Cloudflare Access and WARP recovered; WARP access re‑enabled in London.

• 12:53–13:35 UTC Work continues to restore “application services” more broadly.

• 11:48 UTC Incident first acknowledged; Cloudflare reported “internal service degradation.”

How South African Businesses Are Being Affected

1. Media & Content Platforms

   • Websites like MyBroadband and BusinessTech provide news, analysis, and tech updates. If they are slowed or inaccessible, their traffic and ad revenue could be temporarily impacted.

   • For publishers using Cloudflare’s security or CDN, even short interruptions can reduce pageviews, hurting engagement metrics and potentially ad revenue.

2. SMEs & Local E-commerce

   • Many small-to-medium enterprises in South Africa rely on Cloudflare to speed up their sites, protect against DDoS, and ensure uptime. A breakdown or high error rate could lead to lost sales or frustrated customers.

   • Backup systems (e.g., alternate CDNs or caching) might not fully mitigate the impact for businesses without robust redundancy.

3. Tech Services / Startups

   • Local tech startups using Cloudflare Workers, Access, or WARP could see degraded service or interruptions in internal tools. That can disrupt development workflows, customer-facing apps, or remote access setups.

   • For SA companies building on Cloudflare’s edge compute or security infrastructure, this outage underscores risk in over‑reliance on third-party global infrastructure.

4. Infrastructure Confidence

   • This outage could shake confidence among South African businesses about stability and vendor risk. Decision-makers may now re-evaluate dependency on a single global CDN / edge provider.

   • Some companies might accelerate plans to add redundancy or alternative providers (regional CDNs, multi-CDN strategies).

What South African Users and Businesses Should Do Now

• Monitor Cloudflare’s Status Page: Keep an eye on their official status site for updates.

• Check Local Websites: If you run a site, check analytics or logs for spike in errors or drop in traffic during the outage.

• Implement Redundancy: Consider adding fallback solutions (multi-CDN, local hosting) to mitigate future risk.

• Communicate with Customers: If your customers experienced downtime, send a clear message explaining what happened and what you’re doing to prevent this in the future.

• Set Up Alerts: Use uptime-monitoring tools to get real-time alerts when your site (or important dependencies) goes down.

Why This Matters for South Africa

• Global Infrastructure Risk: Even South African companies are deeply exposed to global infrastructure providers like Cloudflare. When they falter, local businesses feel the pain.

• Digital Resilience: This incident may be a wake-up call for stronger digital resilience strategies among SA businesses not just relying on one provider for critical internet infrastructure.

• Economic Impact: For digital-first businesses, outages can mean lost revenue, reduced customer trust, and operational headaches. Over time, repeated incidents could push more firms to diversify their infrastructure.

Cloudflare Services Slowly Recovering

• Dashboard Access: Fully restored, though some customers may still experience login issues.

• Cloudflare Access & WARP: Error levels have returned to pre-incident rates; WARP access in London has been re-enabled.

• Application Services: Remediation continues for some services affected by the outage.

Support Portal Still Partially Affected

Cloudflare’s support portal, run by a third-party provider, continues to experience issues. Customers may encounter errors when viewing or responding to tickets. Business and Enterprise clients can still use live chat or the emergency phone line for urgent inquiries.

South African Sites Scramble as Global Cloudflare Glitch Disrupts Access

Follow Joburg ETC on Facebook, Twitter , TikTok and Instagram

For more News in Johannesburg, visit joburgetc.com