Cloudflare downtime halts key UAE web services during global blackout

A widespread outage at Cloudflare — the US-based internet infrastructure firm that powers over a fifth of global web traffic — knocked out dozens of websites and services worldwide on Friday, including platforms widely used in the UAE.

In the UAE, businesses and remote workers reported sudden service interruptions as content-management systems, corporate websites and internal tools stopped loading. Local firms confirmed 'several sites down' in Dubai and the wider Emirates, affecting both public-facing services and back-office operations.

The outage triggered 500- and 502-series 'Internal Server Error' messages on many sites. Affected services ranged from creative-design platforms and e-commerce tools to communication apps and CMS dashboards.

Cloudflare’s status page initially identified problems with its dashboard and API endpoints, indicating a systemic failure rather than isolated site misconfigurations.

The disruption marks the second major outage this month — following a similar incident in November that also briefly disabled major platforms globally.

Experts note that while global outages often get quick attention, there’s a risk regional businesses may not anticipate the ripple effects such disruptions cause across supply chains, payment gateways and web tools.

Cloudflare says it deployed a fix and services appear to be coming back online, though it is still monitoring system stability and has not yet confirmed what triggered the failure.