BANGKOK – A recent Cloudflare outage has shown just how fragile the modern internet can be. For a short but intense window of time, some of the world’s most used online services went offline or became unstable, including major platforms like Zoom and LinkedIn. Daily communication, work, and business activity were disrupted, and the impact spread quickly across Asia, especially in Thailand.
Cloudflare, a key global infrastructure provider, sits between many websites and their users. It offers security, content delivery network (CDN) services, and domain resolution for a huge share of the internet. Some estimates suggest it touches nearly 20% of global web traffic. The company confirmed that it suffered a serious service disruption. It was not the result of a cyberattack. Instead, it came from an internal system problem.
According to Cloudflare, the incident started with a configuration change. The change was meant to address a new security issue affecting the wider industry. That update went wrong and overloaded parts of Cloudflare’s internal network. The result was a flood of HTTP 500 error codes that affected websites and online services across the globe.
Global Fallout: Zoom and LinkedIn Temporarily Knocked Offline
The immediate effect was blunt and widespread. People and businesses that rely on constant access to online tools suddenly hit a wall. Many large platforms stopped working or loaded only in parts. Outage reports poured in on social media and on service-status websites, some of which were also affected because they used Cloudflare themselves.
When LinkedIn became unreachable, professionals worldwide faced delays in managing their profiles, networking, or applying for jobs. In a job market where messages, offers, and applications move fast, even a short outage can lead to lost chances and dropped deals.
The impact of the Zoom disruption felt even more personal. With remote work, online classes, and cross-border meetings now part of daily life, a Zoom outage meant cancelled calls, missed lessons, and stalled negotiations. For many companies, this meant that client meetings, job interviews, and internal briefings simply did not happen.
This incident highlighted how strongly modern life depends on a small number of infrastructure providers. Technology experts pointed out that when so much traffic flows through a handful of companies, a single fault can ripple across the entire internet.
“The Cloudflare outage is yet another reminder of how dependent major systems are on just a few cloud infrastructures across the world. For far too long now, people have used cloud services as a single point of reliability rather than accepting shared responsibility.” – Professor Feng Li, Bayes Business School.
Asia Feels the Strain: Thailand’s Digital Economy Takes a Hit
While the failure started at a global level, its effects were deeply local, especially across Southeast Asia. The region’s fast-growing online economy relies heavily on cloud-based tools for speed, security, and reliability.
In Thailand, the outage struck during the busy late afternoon and early evening period, around 6:40 pm local time, according to some reports. Many businesses were in the middle of their workday when services stalled. Local media outlets, e-commerce websites, logistics firms, and several government-related platforms that use Cloudflare for DNS handling or content delivery ran into a range of problems. Some sites became very slow, others failed to load at all.
For Thai users, one of the most worrying issues was the difficulty in reaching international services such as official electronic visa (e-Visa) portals. Travellers trying to submit, update, or track applications were suddenly blocked. For a country like Thailand, where tourism supports a large part of the economy, any disruption to visa systems hits more than convenience; it strikes at daily operations and public trust.
ThaiCERT (Thailand Computer Emergency Response Team) confirmed that the issue led to widespread “500 Internal Server Error” messages across multiple services. The incident has pushed many Thai organisations to reassess how they structure their online systems. Conversations around multi-cloud and multi-CDN setups have gained new urgency, as companies look for ways to reduce their dependence on a single provider.
Back Online: Fixes Applied and the Push for Stronger Internet Infrastructure
Cloudflare’s engineering teams moved quickly once they identified the fault. They traced the problem to a flawed deployment linked to the Web Application Firewall (WAF) system. Once that was rolled back and corrected, services began to recover within minutes, although some users saw lingering issues for a short while.
The company issued a public apology for the disruption and described the outage as unacceptable. Cloudflare stressed that no customer data had been lost or exposed, and promised a full post-incident review. That report, they said, would explain how the fault occurred and what steps would be taken to reduce the risk of a repeat event.
For many online businesses, this outage is another warning after similar failures at other major providers. Size alone does not guarantee stability. The focus is shifting towards more robust and spread-out internet infrastructure, where no single provider can bring down large parts of the web.
For readers of the Chiang Rai Times (that was also affected), the lesson is clear. Local companies, from large enterprises to small Thai startups, need to rethink how they build their online presence. Relying on one cloud, one CDN, or one security provider leaves them exposed.
The internet may appear borderless, but its interruptions are deeply local. When an international provider stumbles, the effects show up as missed Zoom calls, stalled online orders, blocked travel documents, and silent news sites. Planning for that risk is now part of running any serious digital service in Thailand and across Asia.
