Ahmed Kamel – Egypt Daily News
A widespread internet disruption today affected numerous Egyptian and international websites after a technical glitch struck Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest internet infrastructure companies. The outage prevented users from accessing a variety of popular platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), the movie review site Letterboxd, and countless other websites.
Visitors attempting to access affected sites were greeted with messages indicating an “internal server error on the Cloudflare network,” accompanied by a prompt advising them to “please try again in a few minutes,” causing widespread confusion among users globally.
According to The Independent, Cloudflare provides essential backend services that ensure the performance, security, and resilience of tens of millions of websites. Its offerings include protection against cyberattacks, content delivery optimization, and maintaining service continuity under heavy usage — services that typically operate behind the scenes, unnoticed by most users.
In an official update, Cloudflare acknowledged the issue: “We are aware of a problem affecting a number of our customers and are currently investigating it. We will provide further updates as soon as possible.”
The outage’s scale was highlighted by data from DownDetector, a site that monitors service disruptions, which recorded a sharp surge in user reports, reaching hundreds of thousands in just a few hours. The glitch affected websites even if they were not directly hosted by Cloudflare, as many rely on its services for traffic routing or server protection. Consequently, users experienced multiple sites appearing “unavailable” or “missing,” although the problem was rooted in infrastructure rather than the individual websites themselves.
This incident is one of the most significant internet service disruptions in recent years and underscores the global digital ecosystem’s heavy reliance on a small number of infrastructure providers. Even brief technical issues at these companies can cause widespread disruptions across the internet.
