A large-scale internet disruption unfolded on November 18 after Cloudflare (a key provider of traffic routing, website protection, and content delivery) experienced a major outage that spread across the web. The incident began early in the morning in the United States, when users of X started reporting that their feeds failed to load and the platform became partially inaccessible. Within a short time, thousands of reports had been collected, signalling a problem far broader than a routine service glitch. And after a few hours, it became clear that the disruption was coming from Cloudflare itself.
Once Cloudflare’s network began to malfunction, many popular services were affected almost simultaneously. Platforms that depend on Cloudflare’s infrastructure (including X, ChatGPT, certain streaming and creative tools, crypto dashboards, and even some multiplayer gaming services) displayed error screens, loading failures, or complete downtime. In many cases, users encountered internal server messages, suggesting the issue lay deep within the delivery network rather than with individual apps or websites.
Importantly, the disruption also created temporary confusion, as affected sites initially appeared to be experiencing isolated failures. However, as more platforms went offline, it became clear that Cloudflare’s internal systems had a widespread problem that was causing many major websites to go down as well.
Meanwhile, engineers at Cloudflare began investigating almost immediately. Although the company acknowledged the problem early on, it did not offer an immediate explanation for the root cause, only confirming that multiple core services were affected.
“Our support portal provider is currently experiencing issues, and as such customers might encounter errors viewing or responding to support cases. Responses on customer inquiries are not affected, and customers can still reach us via live chat (Business and Enterprise) through the Cloudflare Dashboard, or via the emergency telephone line (Enterprise). We are working alongside our 3rd party provider to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem,” the company noted in its system status page.
At the time of writing this article, some services had reported partial stabilization, but millions of users were still experiencing intermittent problems. Many platforms were urging their audiences to be patient, explaining that the issue was external and could not be fixed on their end. And in its latest status update, Cloudflare said that the company is continuing to work on restoring service for its application services customers.
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