HÀ NỘI — Many Vietnamese news sites and web platforms resumed normal operations this morning after a global outage at US internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare disrupted access for several hours.

Cloudflare suffered an unexplained failure affecting a key part of its network from around 6am ET on November 18 (local time), preventing users worldwide from reaching websites using its services.

Some site owners were also unable to access their performance dashboards. Windows Central reported that the incident coincided with scheduled maintenance at the company’s Santiago (SCL) data centre, though the root cause has not been disclosed.

The outage triggered widespread service disruptions across major platforms, including Elon Musk’s social network X and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Online games such as League of Legends and Valorant reported service problems, while apps including Canva, PayPal and Uber Eats experienced payment and ordering interruptions.

In Việt Nam, several online newspapers and websites, including Công Thương, Thời Báo Ngân hàng, Thương Trường, Petrotimes, tech forum Tinh Tế and legal database Thư Viện Pháp Luật, were briefly unreachable. By 9:44pm local time, access had been largely restored, according to VietNamNet.

Nguyễn Trường Giang, acting director of the Việt Nam Internet Centre, said Cloudflare’s issue had affected a number of local websites, though the scale of the impact was still being assessed.

A separate source said Cloudflare operates points of presence (POPs) in Việt Nam to process and store data locally before routing it overseas.

Lê Quang Hiếu, deputy general director of Viettel Networks, said Vietnamese organisations using Cloudflare services were affected on Tuesday evening. He noted that Viettel provides similar services and that several major news outlets using Viettel infrastructure remained operational during the outage. — VNS