Vietnamese users affected by Cloudflare network disruption earlier this week

Vietnamese users reported widespread 500-level errors and blank pages when loading sites that use Cloudflare's network. 

The provider supports about 20 percent of global websites, and its share in Vietnam is higher as many local media outlets, e-commerce firms and software-as-a-service platforms depend on its content delivery and firewall services.

Cloudflare said in a statement that an "unexpected configuration file" caused software handling traffic routing to fail, interrupting its content delivery network, firewall and proxy services. 

It said the incident was not related to a cyberattack.

Global platforms used heavily in Vietnam, including Canva, ChatGPT and Spotify, also experienced outages.

Canva users experienced delayed design tasks, while ChatGPT users reported widespread access failures. 

Some online retail and e-commerce platforms saw reduced traffic and 500 errors during the disruption.

Outage-tracking site Downdetector, which also relies on Cloudflare, temporarily failed to load, limiting early information available to Vietnamese users.

Cloudflare's disruption caused downtime for many businesses and led to secondary effects such as delayed transactions, customer loss and temporary search-engine access issues.

It has fully restored its services afterwards.