'How could they let this happen?' Cloudflare outage disrupts global web traffic

Stephen Grootes speaks to Duncan McLeod, Founder and Editor of TechCentral about Cloudflare being hit by a major outage on Tuesday, triggering widespread 500-errors.

Listen to the interview in the audio player below. 

Internet infrastructure and security provider, Cloudflare experienced a major outage on Tuesday, causing widespread internet disruption across the world, including in South Africa.

Cloudflare provides cyber-protection to millions of websites worldwide, impacting the overall performance and stability of those sites.

Close to 20% of all websites on the internet utilises Cloudflare's web security services.

The company reported an internal service failure that prevented many sites from loading.

Platforms such as X, ChatGPT, Spotify and Canva were among those affected.

Speaking to Stephen Grootes on The Money Show, Duncan McLeod, founder and editor of TechCentral says it's concerning that this happened to a service which is meant to provide stability to other websites.

"This is the company that many websites turn to provide stability. They market themselves as a cloud infrastructure company that helps stabilise internet services, so these things are not supposed to happen," says McLoed.

"It (internet) was built to withstand a nuclear war, yet here is one service provider bringing down 20% of the internet all on it's own. One has to wonder whether this is all getting centralised," adds McLeod.

Scroll to the top of the article to listen to the full interview.