A massive outage at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare on November 18, 2025, disrupted access to major platforms including X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, multiplayer games, and hundreds of other websites across the globe, leaving millions of users offline. The incident began around 6:20 a.m. ET, with Cloudflare reporting a spike in unusual traffic to one of its services at 11:20 UTC. This surge in traffic caused widespread HTTP 500 errors, impacting everything from popular social media platforms to essential online utilities such as Downdetector, which itself experienced outages due to its reliance on Cloudflare.
The company, which handles nearly 20% of global web traffic and averages 78 million HTTP requests per second, rushed to investigate the issue and deployed fixes aimed at restoring service. Despite these efforts, some customers continued to experience access problems and higher-than-normal error rates for hours following the initial disruption.
Reports of outages peaked at nearly 11,201 by midday, with users affected in regions including the United States, United Kingdom, and India. The impact extended across major platforms and sectors, including messaging services, online design tools, gaming servers, video streaming, and VPN access. OpenAI confirmed on its status page that the incident was caused by a third-party provider, widely attributed to Cloudflare. Other companies such as Canva, Grindr, and Claude AI were similarly affected, temporarily disabling features and displaying persistent error messages.
Cloudflare acknowledged that the incident was the result of “unusual traffic,” potentially signaling another large-scale DDoS attack, as the company previously blocked record-setting attacks in recent months. While Cloudflare was initially undergoing scheduled maintenance in some global regions, the outage spread far beyond its planned scope.
The incident reignited concerns over global infrastructure dependencies, with experts warning that such cascading failures underscore the risks of heavily relying on centralized service providers for core internet operations. The outage followed similar disruptions at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in recent months, raising questions about internet resilience and the need for more robust failsafes.
By afternoon, Cloudflare updated customers indicating that services were gradually recovering; however, technical teams remained on high alert to ensure continued stability and to investigate the root cause of the traffic spike. As services returned, users were advised that some features and sites might still experience intermittent downtimes until systems fully stabilized.
Cloudflare pledged to provide a full post-mortem and in-depth analysis once remediation was complete, highlighting the importance of transparency and ongoing vigilance in response to such widespread digital disruptions.
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