When Cloudflare Went Down: What Happened and What It Means

When Cloudflare Went Down: What Happened and What It Means

On 18 November 2025, Cloudflare — one of the backbone providers of the Internet — experienced a major global outage that affected many well-known platforms. AP News+2Reuters+2

What Went Wrong

• Cloudflare reported internal service degradation, meaning something went wrong inside their systems. Reuters+1

• The company said there was a “spike in unusual traffic” starting around 11:20 UTC, which caused parts of its network to fail or return errors. Reuters+1

• Some core services, including their Dashboard and API, also experienced widespread “500 error” responses. AP News

Who Was Affected

• Very big names: ChatGPT, X (former Twitter), Canva, League of Legends, NJ Transit, Grindr, and others reported issues. AP News+1

• According to Downdetector, thousands of users reported problems at the peak. Reuters

Cloudflare’s Response

• They made “changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover,” and error rates for those services are back to roughly normal. AP News

• However, they warned that some errors may persist even during recovery. AP News+1

• As of now, Cloudflare is “continuing to work toward restoring other services.” Reddit+1

Why It’s a Big Deal

• Cloudflare handles a very large portion of global web traffic. Outages there ripple out. Reuters

• The event shows how fragile internet infrastructure can be, especially when many services rely on a few major providers. The Guardian+1

• For businesses: this is a reminder to build resilience. Relying on a single provider without fallback can be risky.

What You Should Do (If You Use Cloudflare)

1. Monitor your reliance on Cloudflare: Know which of your services use their CDN, DNS, or security features.

2. Have a backup plan: Consider alternative CDNs, DNS providers, or failover routes.

3. Set up alerting: Watch not only your app metrics but also your dependencies’ health.

4. Communicate proactively: If you have customers, have a clear incident-response plan for third-party outages.

5. Learn from post‑mortems: Once Cloudflare publishes a full after-action report, review it and apply any relevant lessons to your own architecture.

References / Sources

• AP News: Cloudflare outage disrupts ChatGPT, X, other internet services AP News

• Reuters: Cloudflare outage cuts access to X, ChatGPT and other web platforms Reuters

• The Guardian: Cloudflare outage causes error messages across the internet The Guardian

• Reddit (users sharing status updates): “Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues” Reddit+1