Global wagering firm Bet365 offline for hours amid widespread Cloudflare outage

Australian Bet365 customers were caught up in widespread service interruptions at the weekend as parts of the internet went offline due to an outage at infrastructure provider Cloudflare, leaving users unable to load the betting site or place wagers.

Cloudflare, a San Francisco‑based web infrastructure and security firm, acknowledged the disruption, saying issues with its services and network caused errors and timeouts for users trying to reach websites that depend on its systems.

The company’s platform acts as a content delivery network (CDN) and security layer, sitting between website visitors and hosting providers to help sites load faster, block malicious traffic, and handle large volumes of requests.

About 20 per cent of all websites globally use at least one Cloudflare service.

During the incident, the outage‑tracking website DownDetector showed thousands of reports from Bet365 users across the UK and Europe, with many unable to access the site or app as the problems persisted into the evening.

Cloudflare did not attribute the outage to an external attack and said engineers were working to restore full availability after identifying and mitigating the underlying issue affecting a subset of its network prefixes.

In addition to Bet365, other online wagering and casino platforms that rely on Cloudflare, such as Sky Bet and Betfair, also reported connectivity problems during the outage, as did non‑gambling services, including food delivery apps and productivity platforms, reflecting the breadth of Cloudflare’s customer base.

The disruption added to a series of recent Cloudflare incidents, including a major outage in November 2025 that knocked offline numerous high‑traffic sites globally and highlighted how dependent many digital services are on a handful of underlying infrastructure providers.

Cloudflare’s network spans more than 330 cities in over 120 countries and connects with thousands of internet networks worldwide to manage traffic and security for host sites, making its services a foundational part of the online ecosystem for both general‑purpose and specialised wagering platforms.

For users of Bet365 and other affected platforms, the outage resulted in interrupted session access and delayed transactions, with companies posting statements confirming service issues and ongoing recovery efforts.

Cloudflare’s systems are designed to help websites maintain availability and protect against traffic spikes and cyber threats, but when its network experiences problems, the effects can cascade across a wide range of dependent digital services.