Today’s Cloudflare Outage: A Simple Report 

On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare—a big company that protects and speeds up millions of websites—faced a huge glitch. This caused a widespread internet blackout, knocking out access to popular sites for hours. Think of it like a major highway getting clogged: traffic backs up everywhere. Services like X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, and many more stopped loading for users around the world. The trouble kicked off early in the morning and was mostly fixed by early afternoon, but it left a trail of frustration and questions. Below, I’ll dive deeper into the details with a clear timeline, more on the chaos it caused, and what experts are saying—all in easy words.

What Happened?

Cloudflare’s problems started small but snowballed fast. Here’s the blow-by-blow from their official status updates:

• Early Morning Trigger (Around 3:48 AM PST / 11:48 UTC): An internal glitch hit Cloudflare’s core systems. Users began seeing error codes like 500 (server overload), 502 (bad gateway), and 503 (service unavailable). These pop up when a website can’t connect properly to its backend.
• Peak Chaos (6-8 AM PST / 14-16 UTC): By early morning on the US West Coast, the outage exploded. Cloudflare’s dashboard (where customers manage their sites) went dark, and tools like their support portal froze—meaning no one could log in to check or tweak settings. Their bot management (anti-spam shield) and firewall also failed, letting errors ripple out to customer websites.
• Global Spread: It wasn’t just one spot. Parts of Africa (like Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania), Asia (Chittagong in Bangladesh), Europe (London), Latin America (Santiago in Chile), the Middle East, North America (Detroit in the US), and Oceania (Noumea in New Caledonia) all felt the hit. Even Cloudflare’s own WARP VPN service got disabled temporarily in London at 1:04 PM UTC (5:04 AM PST).
• No Hack Involved: Good news—this wasn’t a cyber attack from hackers. It was an “internal service degradation,” like a software hiccup that got out of hand. But it still broke thousands of sites, and even Downdetector (the outage tracker) crashed under the flood of reports.

In short, what began as a quiet bug turned into a chain reaction, affecting over 20% of the web’s traffic since so many sites rely on Cloudflare.

Why Did It Happen?

Cloudflare dug into it quickly and shared some early clues. No full “post-mortem” report yet (they promised one soon), but here’s the root cause in plain terms:

• The Hidden Bug: It all traced back to a “latent bug” (a sneaky, old flaw) in their bot mitigation tool. This is the system that blocks bad bots—like spam crawlers or DDoS attackers—from overwhelming websites. The bug had been dormant for a while.
• The Trigger: A routine config change (just tweaking settings) accidentally woke it up. Suddenly, the tool started misfiring, causing crashes in connected services like the CDN (content delivery network) and Workers (serverless code runners).
• The Traffic Tsunami: Right then, an “unusual spike” in web traffic hit—like a sudden rush hour. This could be from normal daily logins, but AI tools (hello, ChatGPT users) are driving more load these days. The combo overloaded the system, spreading errors across Cloudflare’s 300+ global data centers like dominoes.

Cloudflare admitted it “took too long to mitigate,” partly because the bug was rare and hard to spot at first. They’re now auditing code and adding safeguards to prevent “latent” surprises. This echoes recent woes at AWS and Azure—big cloud providers are under more strain from AI boom.

How Bad Was the Impact?

Cloudflare powers about 1 in 5 websites, so one sneeze from them feels like the whole internet catching a cold. This outage hit hard and wide:

• User Numbers: Over 100,000 reports poured into Downdetector in the US and Europe alone within hours. Globally, millions couldn’t access sites—think logins failing, pages blanking, or endless “loading” spins.

• Big Names Knocked Out: Here’s a fuller list of affected services (from user reports and news):

   

   

  Category	Examples Hit
  Social Media	X (Twitter), Facebook, Grindr, Truth Social
  AI & Chat	ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Perplexity, Google Gemini
  Streaming & Games	Spotify, League of Legends, Runescape
  Shopping & Finance	Shopify, PayPal, Uber, DoorDash, Visa, Amazon
  Work Tools	Zoom, Canva, Microsoft Teams, Indeed
  Other	NJ Transit (delays in US trains), federal systems (jokingly reported), Aave (crypto)

   

  Some users saw “unblock challenges.cloudflare.com” prompts that looped endlessly, trapping them out.

• Ripple Effects: It lasted 3-4 hours at peak, but recovery dragged in spots (up to 6 hours). Businesses lost sales—e.g., e-commerce sites like Shopify saw carts abandoned. Stock-wise, Cloudflare’s shares dipped 1.8% in early trading. And yes, this is the third mega-outage in under two months (after AWS in October and Azure last week), spotlighting how AI’s data hunger is stressing servers.

Everyday folks? Frustrated logins during commutes or work calls. One X user called it a “global meltdown.”

How Did They Fix It?

Cloudflare’s team jumped on it like firefighters—here’s the step-by-step recovery:

• Detection (11:17-12:03 UTC / 3:17-4:03 AM PST): They spotted support portal glitches first, then the full degradation at 11:48 UTC.
• Investigation & First Fixes (12:03-13:09 UTC): Engineers traced it to the bot bug. By 1:09 PM UTC (5:09 AM PST), they rolled out a patch, cutting error rates. WARP VPN came back online in London by 1:13 PM UTC.
• Full Rollout (1:22-2:42 PM UTC / 5:22-6:42 AM PST): Dashboard and app services got a big deployment fix. By 2:42 PM UTC, they declared the core issue “resolved,” though bot scores (anti-spam ratings) wobbled during cleanup.
• Monitoring (Up to 4:04 PM UTC / 8:04 AM PST): Teams watched for aftershocks. Now, their status page shows green across the board—no major alerts. (Note: Separate planned maintenance in Sydney started at 7:00 AM PST and is unrelated.)

Cloudflare tweeted updates every 15-30 minutes, which helped calm nerves. They’re promising a deep-dive report in the coming days.

What People Are Saying

The outage sparked a mix of anger, memes, and props for transparency:

• From Cloudflare’s Side: CTO Dane Knecht posted an apology on X: “This was unacceptable—we let customers down. We’re owning it, fixing it, and rebuilding trust with better testing.” (Echoing their quick status posts.)
• User Gripes on X: Thousands vented. One said, “Cloudflare outage wrecked my morning—X down, ChatGPT ghosting me, even Spotify skipping beats.” Another joked, “Is this the apocalypse? Or just Cloudflare having a bad hair day?” Crypto fans noted hits to Aave and Dione Protocol spaces. Some praised: “At least Cloudflare admits faults fast—looking at you, other clouds.”
• Expert Takes: Tech writers called it a “wake-up call on centralization—one provider down, web wobbles.” No wild conspiracy theories stuck (despite a few political jabs), but it fueled talks on diversifying providers. Reddit’s r/technology thread hit 800+ upvotes, debating AI’s role in these spikes.

Wrapping It Up

This Cloudflare hiccup reminds us: The internet’s a web of connections, and one weak thread can tangle everything. But kudos to their fast response—it could’ve been worse. If your site’s on Cloudflare, double-check your backups. Things are back to normal now, but watch for that full report. Got outage stories? Drop ’em in the comments—let’s chat!

Last updated: November 18, 2025, 4 PM PST. Sources include Cloudflare’s status page and live reports.