On the morning of November 18, 2025, web users around the world, including Hackread.com readers, began encountering error pages and inaccessible apps. The disruption originated with Cloudflare, Inc., a web-infrastructure company whose network handles an estimated 20% of global web traffic.
What went wrong
At about 6:40 a.m. ET (11:40 UTC), Cloudflare logged “internal service degradation” after an unusually large traffic event hit one of its services, causing elevated error rates across its network. The company’s status page listed “degraded performance” for core functions like Bot Management and Edge Network.
Later in the day, Cloudflare’s Chief Technology Officer, Dane Knecht, publicly addressed the disruption, stating: “I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare’s network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us.”
He clarified that the root cause was a latent bug triggered by a routine configuration change in a service underpinning Bot Mitigation. That bug then cascaded into broader traffic errors across the network. He stressed it was not an attack.
Cloudflare later confirmed that, “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”
Who was affected
Because Cloudflare serves as a content-delivery and security layer for a vast number of websites and platforms, the impact rippled widely:
- Hackread.com, Canva, Uber, IKEA, Shopify, League of Legends, DoorDash, Discord, Patreon, Medium, Crunchyroll, GitLab, Udemy and many more.
- Popular AI tools such as ChatGPT and other LLM services reported outages or high error rates.
- Social-media platform X (formerly Twitter) experienced disruptions.
- Other streaming or gaming services, large web-apps and corporate domains relying on Cloudflare’s network also reported errors.
Downdetector – a user-reported outage tracker – showed tens of thousands of reports at peak for affected services. However, the platform itself faced Clouflare-related issues.
Cloudflare is not a household brand in the way Apple or Google are, yet a major part of the internet’s functionality and security depends on it. When a service like this owns so much traffic, faults can escalate quickly from “one site down” to “large-scale service disruption.”
Some Sites Still Facing Issues
While Cloudflare’s CTO says the issue is resolved, users on X are pointing out that it is not fully back to normal. Many, including Hackread.com, are still dealing with slow loading, problems inside dashboards, redirects to a Cloudflare error window and trouble saving drafts or reaching the login page.
Some users also report that they cannot log in to Cloudflare or open the service properly on either computers or smartphones.
Nevertheless, it feels like the internet barely caught its breath from the last widespread disruption. Just a month ago, AWS went down and knocked countless services offline, as detailed in the Hackread.com report. Now Cloudflare is dealing with its own outage, turning this into the second major breakdown of core web infrastructure within a short span.