On 18 November 2025, Cloudflare, a major internet infrastructure and content-delivery provider, suffered a significant global outage, disrupting access to several high-profile websites and services. Platforms including X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT experienced widespread errors, highlighting how deeply many online services depend on a handful of infrastructure firms.
Cloudflare reported that the incident began in the early hours, around 6:40 a.m. ET, when its internal systems started degrading. By mid-morning, the company noted a spike in “unusual traffic” beginning at 11:20 UTC, which caused network congestion and errors across its global network.
At its height, outage-tracking site Downdetector registered thousands of reports, although some of its own monitoring also saw interruptions due to reliance on Cloudflare’s infrastructure. Cloudflare later confirmed it had deployed a fix to restore its status dashboard, but warned that some application services remained degraded.
The impact extended beyond just social media and AI. Services affected included Canva, Grindr, Spotify, NJ Transit, League of Legends, and more. In some regions, Cloudflare temporarily disabled its WARP encryption service to assist remediation; for example, WARP access was later re-enabled for users in London.
Cloudflare supports roughly 20 percent of websites globally, acting as a critical gatekeeper for performance, security, and content delivery. That means when a disruption hits its network, the effects can cascade across very different types of services, from social media and AI to transportation systems.
This outage amplifies long-standing concerns about concentration in internet infrastructure. Only a small number of firms power vast parts of the web, so when one fails, its scale becomes plainly visible. As noted by observers, this fault came just weeks after large outages at other major cloud providers, underscoring the fragility of modern internet architecture.
It described the root cause as a “spike in unusual traffic” but admitted it did not yet know why that traffic surge occurred.
In its status updates, Cloudflare reported that it had restored its dashboard and was working to bring its broader application services back to normal. To assist recovery, it disabled and later re-enabled WARP access in at least one region. Meanwhile, it pledged a post-mortem once systems stabilised fully.
This is not the first time such an outage has highlighted the risk of centralization in digital infrastructure. In June 2025, a widespread Internet disruption, traced partly to Google Cloud, took down platforms including Spotify, Discord, and services built on Cloudflare Workers. That incident drew attention to the interconnected dependencies among major cloud providers, an issue that resurfaces now.
For users: if X, ChatGPT, or other services were unreachable today, the fault likely lies upstream at the infrastructure level, not with your device or internet connection. The disruption should ease as Cloudflare continues to recover, but intermittent errors could persist.
For businesses and service operators: this incident is a reminder of the importance of redundancy. Relying entirely on a single provider can leave you, and your users, vulnerable. Teams should review their architecture, perhaps consider backup routes or alternate infrastructure, and develop incident-response plans.
Cloudflare’s outage on 18 November highlights how fragile parts of today’s internet infrastructure remain, even for companies with deep technical capabilities. As engineers work to stabilize services, the broader tech industry will be watching closely. Questions about redundancy, risk planning, and decentralization may gain fresh urgency, particularly for organizations building critical online services.
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