A widespread outage at Cloudflare, a critical internet infrastructure provider, disrupted access to numerous high-profile websites and services on November 18, 2025, causing intermittent failures across the global web.
The issue stemmed from an internal service degradation that triggered HTTP 500 errors, affecting Cloudflare’s dashboard, API, and core network services, leading to partial downtime for millions of users worldwide.
Cloudflare first acknowledged the problem at 11:48 UTC, stating it was experiencing an internal service degradation with some services intermittently impacted, and committed to restoring functionality as quickly as possible.
By 12:03 UTC, the company was still investigating, followed by an update at 12:21 UTC noting that services were beginning to recover, though customers might see higher-than-normal error rates during remediation. At 12:37 UTC, Cloudflare confirmed it was continuing the investigation, with no full resolution announced by late afternoon UTC.
Compounding the irony, Cloudflare’s own status page became inaccessible during the peak, preventing real-time updates for affected users.
The outage rippled across the internet, hitting platforms reliant on Cloudflare’s content delivery network (CDN), DDoS protection, and DNS services.
Social media giant X (formerly Twitter) saw patchy availability, with users reporting loading failures and error messages citing Cloudflare’s internal server issues; Downdetector logged over 11,000 reports at its height, with 61% tied to the X mobile app and 28% to the website.
AI services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Perplexity AI were inaccessible for many, displaying Cloudflare error pages that urged retries in a few minutes.
Other impacted services including design tool Canva, music streaming service Spotify, gaming platforms like League of Legends and Discord, e-commerce site Shopify, blogging network Medium, and even crypto exchanges dependent on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
Film review site Letterboxd and outage tracker Downdetector itself joined the fray, amplifying user frustration as reports surged globally. The disruptions echoed a similar Amazon Web Services outage last month, underscoring the fragility of centralized internet dependencies.
Scheduled maintenance in datacenters like LAX (Los Angeles, 10:00-14:00 UTC), ATL (Atlanta, 07:00 UTC Nov 18 to 22:00 UTC Nov 19), SCL (Santiago, 12:00-15:00 UTC), and PPT (Tahiti, 12:00-16:00 UTC) may have exacerbated latency, with traffic rerouted potentially contributing to the chaos. Additionally, Cloudflare’s support portal faced separate issues from a third-party provider, hindering case viewing but not response handling.
As of 6:24 PM IST, recovery efforts were ongoing according to the status page, with many sites regaining stability but lingering errors reported in regions like Europe, North America, and Asia. Cloudflare emphasized its focus on mitigation, promising further details post-resolution, while users turned to alternatives amid the digital blackout.
On October 20, 2025, AWS experienced a prolonged disruption in its US-EAST-1 region, which is crucial for numerous applications. This outage lasted over 15 hours and affected services such as Slack, Atlassian, and Snapchat.
Following this, on October 29, Azure faced a global outage due to an inadvertent DNS configuration change. This issue impacted Azure Front Door and CDN, leading to connection timeouts and resolution problems worldwide, with critical status reported across all regions.
Cloudflare Update [Nov 18, 2025 – 14:34 UTC] – We’ve deployed a change which has restored dashboard services. We are still working to remediate broad application services impact.
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