Cloudflare Outage Jolts the Internet: What Happened, and Who Was Affected

Key Findings:

• Cloudflare, a major web infrastructure company that handles an estimated 20% of global web traffic, experienced a service disruption on November 18, 2025.

• The disruption caused errors and inaccessibility for a wide range of websites and online services, including Hackread.com, Canva, Uber, IKEA, Shopify, League of Legends, DoorDash, Discord, Patreon, Medium, Crunchyroll, GitLab, Udemy, and popular AI tools like ChatGPT.

• The root cause was a latent bug triggered by a routine configuration change in a service underpinning Cloudflare's Bot Mitigation, which then cascaded into broader traffic errors across the network.

• While Cloudflare's CTO stated that the issue has been resolved, some users are still reporting ongoing problems, including slow loading, issues inside dashboards, redirects to Cloudflare error windows, and trouble logging in or accessing the service.

Background

Cloudflare is a web-infrastructure company that provides content delivery, security, and other services to millions of websites and online platforms. The company's network is estimated to handle around 20% of global web traffic, making it a critical component of the internet's infrastructure.

Root Cause and Cloudflare's Response

On the morning of November 18, 2025, Cloudflare logged "internal service degradation" after an unusually large traffic event hit one of its services, causing elevated error rates across its network. The company's CTO, Dane Knecht, later revealed that the root cause was a latent bug triggered by a routine configuration change in a service underpinning Bot Mitigation. This bug then cascaded into broader traffic errors across the network.

Knecht stressed that the issue was not the result of an attack, and that a fix had been implemented to resolve the incident. Cloudflare confirmed that the service was back to normal, but some users continue to report ongoing issues.

Impact and Affected Services

Because Cloudflare serves as a content-delivery and security layer for a vast number of websites and platforms, the impact of the outage rippled widely. Numerous high-profile services, including Hackread.com, Canva, Uber, IKEA, Shopify, League of Legends, DoorDash, Discord, Patreon, Medium, Crunchyroll, GitLab, and Udemy, reported errors and inaccessibility.

Popular AI tools, such as ChatGPT and other large language models, also experienced outages or high error rates. The social media platform X (formerly Twitter) was among the services that encountered disruptions.

Downdetector, a user-reported outage tracker, showed tens of thousands of reports at the peak of the incident for affected services. However, Downdetector itself faced Cloudflare-related issues, underscoring the widespread nature of the disruption.

Resilience and Future Considerations

As AI-driven applications demand real-time reliability, Misbah Rehman, the Vice President of Product Management and Compliance at Alkira, emphasized the need for networks to move beyond fragile, single cloud-dependent footprints to a more resilient, provider-agnostic fabric.

Rehman advised that this means building resilient-by-design infrastructure that does not assume the availability of any single provider, cloud, or network layer, and decoupling control planes from underlying infrastructure. This approach aims to give enterprises the ability to route, fail over, or isolate issues instantly across clouds, regions, and partners, ensuring the continued availability of critical services.

Sources

• https://hackread.com/cloudflare-outage-jolts-internet-who-was-hit/

• https://securityonline.info/cloudflare-outage-crashes-the-internet-x-chatgpt-and-major-websites-inaccessible/