Cloudflare Apologizes After Major Outage Affects X, ChatGPT, and More
On November 18, 2025, a widespread internet outage caused major disruptions across several popular websites and apps, including social media giant X (formerly Twitter), the AI platform ChatGPT, and streaming services like Spotify. The issue was traced back to Cloudflare, a critical player in internet infrastructure that provides security and performance services for millions of websites worldwide.
The outage began around 11:30 AM GMT when users started reporting problems accessing these platforms, and the situation quickly escalated. Cloudflare confirmed the issue, describing it as a "significant outage" triggered by a malfunctioning configuration file designed to handle internet traffic. This glitch caused a crash in the system that manages the traffic for its clients. According to Cloudflare, the file had grown too large and failed to manage the "threat traffic" properly, leading to widespread disruptions.
Cloudflare issued an apology to both its customers and the broader internet community. In a statement, the company said, “Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” acknowledging the far-reaching impact the incident had. While the problem was eventually resolved, users continued to experience delays as services came back online, with some still encountering issues.
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The outage affected a wide range of services beyond the high-profile sites. For instance, apps like Grindr, Zoom, and Canva were also reported as being down or experiencing technical glitches. Even Downdetector, the site typically used to monitor outages, was affected. As part of the recovery process, Cloudflare had to disable a feature called Warp in London, which caused users there to struggle with internet connectivity.
Cloudflare, which serves as a shield against cyber threats for a significant portion of the internet, has been described as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of.” It is used by about 20% of all websites to protect against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and other malicious threats. However, this central role in internet infrastructure makes it a single point of failure when issues arise.
Cybersecurity experts, like Alp Toker from NetBlocks, warned that the outage revealed how reliant the internet has become on services like Cloudflare. While Cloudflare assured there was no evidence of malicious activity or cyber-attacks, the incident underscores the fragility of the global web infrastructure. As a result of this outage, Cloudflare’s share price dropped by about 3%, reflecting the financial impact of the disruption.
This incident follows a series of similar outages in recent months, including a major disruption to Amazon Web Services (AWS) that affected thousands of sites. Cybersecurity experts have been increasingly concerned about the concentration of internet traffic and critical services within a few large companies like Cloudflare, AWS, and Microsoft Azure. When these services fail, the ripple effect is swift and far-reaching.
The Cloudflare outage serves as a reminder of just how interconnected and fragile the systems we rely on for everyday internet use truly are. Despite the company’s swift response to resolve the issue, the event highlights a growing concern about the lack of redundancy in these key internet infrastructure services.
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