KUALA LUMPUR, November 19 — A major global outage at Cloudflare on Tuesday left thousands of users worldwide unable to access key online platforms, with several Malaysian websites — including the Pocket News Portal and Bursa Malaysia’s platforms — experiencing hours of downtime.
The disruption, which began shortly before 8pm local time, caused widespread 500 errors across sites routed through Cloudflare’s network, affecting major services such as X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva and multiple local news outlets.
Cloudflare later confirmed that the incident was triggered by an auto-generated configuration file that grew too large and crashed part of its traffic-handling system, but stressed that there was no indication of a cyberattack or malicious activity.
Bursa Malaysia confirmed late Tuesday night that all its platforms had been fully restored, issuing an update at 11.34pm announcing the return to normal operations and thanking users for their patience. Cloudflare also began restoring services globally after deploying a fix.
Though it cautioned that some users might continue to experience intermittent issues as systems stabilised. The outage underscored Cloudflare’s critical role as one of the world’s largest internet infrastructure providers, with its network carrying roughly 20% of global web traffic.
Despite recovery progress, the incident highlighted the vulnerabilities of centralised internet infrastructure, coming just weeks after a major Amazon Web Services outage disrupted platforms worldwide.
