Cloudflare outage shuts down Nova Scotia government websites

Lava lamps are seen through a lobby window at the headquarters of Cloudflare in San Francisco, Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2022. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)

The Nova Scotia government’s websites were off-line for part of the day because of an outage at Cloudflare, a widely used internet infrastructure company based in San Francisco.

The company says the disruption of its services started just before 8 a.m. Atlantic time, affecting thousands of customers, including ChatGPT, Spotify, OpenAI and the X social media platform.

A spokesperson for the Nova Scotia government says the outage affected many programs and online services, including access to news releases and digital services delivered on novascotia.ca.

According to website profiler BuiltWith.com, Cloudflare has 5,000 customers in Nova Scotia.

Aside from the provincial government, its clients including Halifax’s Dalhousie and Saint Mary’s universities, grocery giant Sobeys Inc. in Stellarton, N.S., and garment maker Stanfields, based in Truro, N.S.

By 10:42 a.m., Cloudflare said the problem had been fixed, but the company followed up with another message less than 20 minutes later saying some customers were still experiencing problems.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 18, 2025.