Internet users around the world faced chaos on November 18, 2025, as a massive Cloudflare outage knocked out popular sites like X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Shopify, and many more. The cybersecurity giant, which powers about 20% of web traffic and protects millions of websites from attacks, quickly identified and fixed the problem in under four hours. Cloudflare executives apologize deeply, calling the disruption “unacceptable” and promising stronger safeguards.
The Cloudflare outage started around 11:20 UTC (6:20 am ET) after engineers spotted unusual traffic spikes. It triggered widespread 500 errors, leaving users staring at blank screens or error messages. No evidence points to a cyberattack, officials confirm it stemmed from an internal glitch. So, here is everything you need to know about this massive outage.
What Caused The Cloudflare Outage?
Cloudflare resolves the issue fully by 14:30 UTC. Key details include:
- Root Cause: An automatically generated configuration file (used to manage threat traffic) grew too large, crashing the software that handles services.
- Duration: About 3-4 hours of major disruption; some dashboard access lingered longer.
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- Not an Attack: Spokesperson Jackie Dutton stresses “no evidence of cyberattack or malicious activity.”
- Resolution Time: Engineers deploy a fix quickly; most sites recover by early afternoon.
The outage highlights how reliant the internet is on providers like Cloudflare, which acts as a shield against DDoS attacks and traffic overloads for hundreds of thousands of companies.
Impact And Cloudflare’s Response
Millions feel the pain as major platforms go offline globally. Affected services include:
- X (Twitter)
- ChatGPT and OpenAI tools
- Shopify, Canva, Grindr
- Anthropic’s Claude, Spotify
- Even Downdetector (the outage tracker itself!)
Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht posts on X: “That issue, impact it caused and time to resolution is unacceptable. It caused real pain today. The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most and we are going to do what it takes to earn that back.”
The company vows a full post-mortem report soon and immediate work to prevent repeats. As services return to normal on November 19, this Cloudflare outage serves as a stark reminder of the web’s fragile backbone. Stay updated, normal browsing resumes!
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