Millions of online transactions across Africa and the world came to a sudden halt on Tuesday morning as a major outage at Cloudflare, one of the internet’s most critical backbone providers, cascaded into widespread service disruptions. Among the hardest-hit services was Paystack, Nigeria’s leading payment gateway, leaving merchants, freelancers, and everyday users unable to accept or make payments for hours.
What Happened?
At approximately 11:20 GMT (12:20 WAT), Cloudflare detected an “unusually high volume of traffic” that triggered internal failures across multiple systems. The incident rapidly escalated into a global degradation affecting:
- Cloudflare Dashboard & API
- Bot Management
- Workers (edge computing)
- WARP / Zero Trust services
- DNS resolution and CDN caching for millions of domains
Cloudflare engineers declared a critical incident at 11:40 GMT and identified the root cause within 90 minutes. By 13:15 GMT, they began rolling out a fix, but full recovery has been gradual, with some regions and services still experiencing elevated error rates more than eight hours later.
Paystack Caught in the Crossfire
Paystack, which processes billions of dollars annually for over 200,000 businesses in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, and beyond, relies heavily on Cloudflare for DNS, DDoS protection, WAF (Web Application Firewall), and global traffic routing.
As soon as Cloudflare’s systems faltered, Paystack users began seeing:
- 500 Internal Server Errors on checkout pages
- “Payment failed – try again later” messages
- Inability to initialize the Paystack inline or popup widget
- Timeouts on API calls to https://api.paystack.co
Popular platforms that integrate Paystack including Selar, PiggyVest, Train Nigeria (formerly BookNow), restaurants on Chowdeck, and countless e-commerce stores were effectively paralyzed during peak morning trading hours.
Real-Time Impact Across Africa
By 1:00 PM WAT, Downdetector recorded a massive spike in Paystack outage reports, with over 4,000 complaints in Nigeria alone. Social media (especially X) was flooded with frustration:
- “How am I supposed to pay for this flight ticket when Paystack is down because of Cloudflare???”
- “All my customers are abandoning cart right now. This is the worst possible day for this.”
- “Even Flutterwave and PayU are struggling. Everything that touches Cloudflare is on fire today.”
The timing was particularly painful: Tuesday is one of the busiest online shopping days in Nigeria ahead of Black Friday, and many salary payments had just hit accounts.
Official Statements
Cloudflare (status.cloudflare.com):
“We have implemented a fix for the issue and are currently monitoring recovery. Some customers may continue to see elevated error rates as systems stabilize.”
Paystack (status.paystack.com as of 7:00 PM WAT):
No incident declared on the official page (last updated 2024), but the team posted on X: “We’re aware some customers are experiencing issues completing transactions due to an ongoing incident at one of our upstream providers. The provider has deployed a fix and services are recovering. Thank you for your patience.”
Broader Global Fallout
Paystack was far from alone. Other major services affected on November 18 included:
- OpenAI / ChatGPT (intermittent 502/504 errors)
- X (formerly Twitter) – slow loading worldwide
- Spotify, Crunchyroll, Grindr
- Major crypto exchanges (Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini)
- Amazon, Shopify stores, and thousands of others
This incident once again highlighted the internet’s hidden fragility: a single point of failure at Cloudflare can bring down 20–25% of all websites globally.
What Should Businesses and Users Do?
- For Merchants
- Temporarily enable alternative gateways (Flutterwave, Stripe, Remita, Interswitch) if you have them.
- Communicate clearly to customers via WhatsApp, email, or social media.
- Consider bank transfer or USSD as fallback options for urgent sales.
- For Customers
- Retry transactions after a few minutes most are now succeeding.
- Use a different browser or disable VPN if you’re still seeing errors.
- Avoid making payments on public Wi-Fi until full stability is confirmed.
- For Developers
- Implement proper retry logic with exponential backoff on Paystack API calls.
- Cache static assets aggressively to reduce dependency on real-time CDN responses.
When Will Everything Be Normal Again?
As of 9:00 PM WAT on November 18, 2025, Cloudflare reports that “all services are now operational with normal performance,” and Paystack transactions are flowing normally for the vast majority of users. Isolated errors may still occur for the next few hours as caches repopulate globally.
Final Word
Today’s outage was a stark reminder that even the most reliable modern payment systems sit atop a complex, interconnected stack. For African fintechs like Paystack that have brought millions into the digital economy, incidents like this while rare underscore the importance of multi-region, multi-provider resilience.
Paystack and its peers will almost certainly be reviewing their Cloudflare dependency in the coming weeks.
For now, the internet is breathing again and Africa’s digital economy is back online.
