Several offices and events were severely affected on Tuesday evening as disruptions hit Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure which provides content delivery network services, cybersecurity, and wide area network services. Although the company implemented fixes within hours, it led to delays and disruptions across the UAE. Sites including X and OpenAI suffered increased outages during the period.

At the World Masters Jiu Jitsu Championship in Abu Dhabi, some matches were delayed by more than three hours due to the issue. One participant who did not wish to be named said that she waited in the warmup area for a long time.

"My match was supposed to be at 3:45pm and everything was progressing as normal,” she said.“Suddenly, all the matches were suspended. At first, we couldn't understand what was happening but then we heard that there were internet outages. I waited for almost three hours. My friends and team were in the gallery waiting for me. I asked them to go home because I felt bad making them wait for so long. Finally, my match happened at around 6:45pm. I was really tired and it impacted my performance as well."

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Dubai resident Mohamed Hamdan said that his office work was disrupted for over two hours due to the outage.“I work in a media company and several tools that we use, including for social media scheduling and audio transcription was unavailable,” he said.“No one could work. So we all left the office early and then continued working from home once the services were restored."

Hours later, Cloudflare updated on their dashboard that a fix had been implemente and that the incident was resolved. It added that it was continuing to monitor the situation.

Some experts said that it was hard to say what caused the outage and Cloudflare are yet to release a full incident report.

According to Will Papper, co-founder of Syndicate said that the Cloudflare outage was not an“isolated event” but part of a larger issue.“It's a consequence of how the modern internet is architected,” he said.“We have concentrated critical functions like DNS, routing, traffic filtering, and API gateways into a few centralised coordination layers that determine how traffic flows and whether websites and services remain reachable.”

He added that to avoid repeat of events like this, there needs to be more decentralised, fault-tolerant infrastructure that doesn't depend on any single provider.

Earlier this year, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage disrupted several popular websites, including Roblox, Snapchat, Fortnite, and Amazon- for almost three hours. At the time, local tech business owner Jen Blandos had said that it should be a wakeup call for companies to work around them.

According to media reports, a Cloudflare spokesperson said the cause of the outage was a spike in unusual traffic and that there was no evidence that it was a result of an attack or caused by malicious activity.

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