From 12:20 PM to 3:30 PM, hundreds of millions of internet users encountered 500, 502, or 503 errors, blank pages, or infinite loading times. Among the major platforms affected worldwide were X (Twitter), ChatGPT/OpenAI, Claude AI, Discord, Spotify, Canva, Revolut, League of Legends, Facebook (partially), Decathlon, Marmiton, Doctissimo, Vinted, Feedly…

Cloudflare acknowledged the incident around 12:48: an unusual traffic spike saturated part of its network, leading to a cascade of failures.

Unlike some past outages that mainly affected Europe or North America, this failure was truly global, and Morocco was hit hard. The most used sites and services in Morocco that depend on Cloudflare were inaccessible, including some media outlets (Medi1TV, Médias24, Chouf TV, Telquel, LeDesk, Alyaoum24, etc.), and online banking services (several bank customers reported being unable to connect to their web or mobile customer areas).

The outage also affected some e-government and visa portals. Certain electronic visa application platforms (Thailand, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, etc.) were also inaccessible.

Cloudflare claims to protect approximately 20% of the global web. In Morocco, its adoption has exploded in recent years. The majority of media outlets, e-commerce sites, and even some government agencies and banks rely on its services to protect themselves from DDoS attacks and accelerate loading times (very useful with sometimes unstable mobile connections). As a result, when Cloudflare sneezes, the entire digital ecosystem catches a cold.