Massive Cloudflare Outage Sparks Global Internet Disruption, Hits Thai Websites and Digital Services

A major Cloudflare outage on Tuesday caused widespread disruption across the global internet, impacting thousands of websites, platforms, and online services — including Thailand Business News, which temporarily became unreachable due to issues affecting Cloudflare’s DNS infrastructure.

The incident, lasting several hours, triggered error messages, service slowdowns, and complete downtime across multiple regions. Websites relying on Cloudflare’s content delivery network (CDN), DNS services, and security layers were among those most severely affected.

What Caused the Outage

Cloudflare confirmed that the disruption originated from a sudden spike in unexpected traffic combined with a faulty internal configuration affecting its global network. The issue cascaded across 19 data centers worldwide, interrupting critical services including Web Application Firewall (WAF), DNS resolution, and Workers KV — a backbone for many authentication and routing functions.

While Cloudflare stressed the incident was not the result of a cyberattack, the company acknowledged that its systems were overloaded, resulting in timeouts, HTTP 500 errors, and intermittent service failures across its infrastructure.

Global Platforms Affected

Major international platforms were among the first to report disruption, including:

• X (formerly Twitter)
• ChatGPT
• Various fintech, e-commerce, and SaaS applications
• News websites, APIs, and content platforms

Users reported “site unreachable” errors, failed DNS lookups, and service interruptions on both mobile and broadband networks.

Impact on Thailand and Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia felt the effects sharply due to the region’s heavy reliance on Cloudflare for website acceleration and DDoS protection.

In Thailand, numerous local businesses, government portals, and media websites experienced delays or downtime. Companies using Cloudflare DNS — including Thailand Business News — saw temporary connectivity failures when DNS resolution began timing out across Cloudflare’s affected data centers.

Digital advertisers, logistics platforms, and cross-border e-commerce operations also reported slowdowns during peak business hours.

Cloudflare’s Response and Recovery

Cloudflare engineers deployed a fix within hours, gradually restoring global traffic flow. However, “residual impact” remained for some services, especially those dependent on the company’s edge-computing and authentication features.

The company has since begun implementing infrastructure adjustments to improve resilience and minimize the risk of similar cascading failures.

Why This Matters for Businesses

The outage highlights a growing structural risk in today’s internet ecosystem: high dependency on a small number of global infrastructure providers. Even though the internet is designed to be decentralized, services such as Cloudflare, AWS, and Google Cloud act as central hubs for traffic and security.

For Southeast Asian businesses increasingly reliant on cloud-based operations, the event underscores several key vulnerabilities:

• DNS centralization can create single points of failure
• Third-party cloud outages can cascade rapidly
• Security rules, if misconfigured, can generate systemic failures
• CDN and DDoS protection layers are now essential but deeply interconnected

Companies operating in Thailand may need to reassess their redundancy strategies — including secondary DNS providers, multi-CDN setups, and independent failover plans — to ensure operational continuity during similar incidents.

Looking Ahead

While Cloudflare has restored services, the outage serves as a reminder that even the most sophisticated global infrastructure is not immune to disruption. For media platforms like Thailand Business News and countless other organizations relying on Cloudflare across Asia, the event reinforces the need for stronger digital resilience as the region’s online economy continues to expand.