As many of you surfing the web today or trying to order or make payment from an app will have noticed, much of the online world has been put on hold due to a global outage linked to Cloudflare, which protects much of the Internet. Cloudflare has said that the outage is linked to an unusual spike in traffic just prior to the outage.

A number of CFD broker websites seems to be down, at least for users in many regions, as well as some popular FX and CFD industry user websites such as Forex Factory, as per the graphic above when visiting forexfactory.com.

FNG has spoken with a number of brokers whose websites and operations have been largely unaffected. However, each of the brokers reported issues in being able to process incoming and outgoing own and customer funds for the past few hours.

In the “bigger picture” it isn’t of course just the online trading sector affected by what’s happening with Cloudflare, with reports of problems on major social networks including X.com (formerly Twitter), on ChatGPT and OpenAI, on PayPal, on transit apps around the world, and almost anywhere the Internet touches.

Cloudflare itself, on its cloudflarestatus.com page, reported about two and a half hours ago that it is “experiencing an internal service degradation”. The latest Cloudflare update (at 14:34 UTC), after several updates that it is “continuing working on restoring service for application services customers” now states:

“We’ve deployed a change which has restored dashboard services. We are still working to remediate broad application services impact.”