Cloudflare Outage Takes Down Major Websites Across the Globe
November 18, 2025 — A huge Cloudflare outage , one of the internet’s most critical infrastructure providers, disrupted access to numerous high-profile websites today, affecting millions of users worldwide and highlighting the fragility of the modern web’s centralized infrastructure.
The Outage
The problems began at approximately 11:48 UTC (around 6:48 AM EST), when Cloudflare acknowledged experiencing an internal service degradation. Users attempting to access popular platforms encountered widespread error messages, including 500 errors and failures affecting the Cloudflare Dashboard and API.
Major websites affected included X (formerly Twitter) and film reviewing site Letterboxd, with users seeing error messages indicating that Cloudflare outage problems prevented pages from loading. Gaming platforms like League of Legends and Valorant also experienced connection issues, while ChatGPT and OpenAI services were similarly impacted.
The Ironic Twist
In a particularly ironic development, Downdetector, the website that users typically visit to check for internet outages, was itself taken down by the Cloudflare failure. Users attempting to report the Cloudflare outage found themselves staring at blank screens, underscoring just how dependent the modern internet has become on a handful of infrastructure providers.
Users on social media described the scope of the problem dramatically, with one stating that “90% of the internet is unusable” and another claiming “half of the internet is not working.”
Scale and Impact
Cloudflare’s global network comprises distributed infrastructure across over 330 cities in more than 120 countries, with 449 Tbps of network edge capacity connecting to over 13,000 networks worldwide. This vast reach means that when Cloudflare experiences problems, the ripple effects extend across seemingly unconnected websites and services.
The Cloudflare outage began around 11:30 AM UK time, with some sites briefly loading after refreshes before failing again. Testing revealed that Cloudflare nodes across Europe were affected, including those in Bucharest, Zurich, Warsaw, Oslo, Amsterdam, Berlin, Frankfurt, Vienna, Stockholm, and Hamburg.
Possible Causes
While Cloudflare has not officially identified the root cause, the company had scheduled heavy maintenance for November 18, 2025, across multiple data centers. The volume of simultaneous maintenance work combined with the global alert suggests something may have gone wrong during these updates.
Recovery Efforts
By approximately 7:29 EST, Cloudflare reported seeing signs of recovery, noting that “customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.” The company’s status page later showed that the majority of core services, including API, CDN, DNS, and Dashboard, were returning to operational status.
However, Cloudflare indicated it would continue investigating the incident, with some regions still experiencing potential latency issues due to ongoing scheduled maintenance.
A Pattern of Outages
This incident comes approximately one month after an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage also took much of the internet offline, highlighting ongoing concerns about the concentration of internet infrastructure in the hands of a few major providers. Cloudflare previously addressed a major outage in October caused by a DNS failure on its AWS cloud computing platform, and mitigated another massive outage in June affecting Zero Trust WARP connectivity.
The Broader Issue
The outage serves as a stark reminder of the internet’s vulnerability to single points of failure. When companies like Cloudflare, which provide invisible but essential services to millions of websites, experience technical problems, the cascading effects can disrupt everything from social media to online gaming, e-commerce, and business productivity tools.
As businesses and individuals increasingly rely on cloud-based services, today’s incident raises important questions about redundancy, resilience, and the risks of centralized internet infrastructure. While Cloudflare’s engineers worked quickly to restore services, the event demonstrates that even the most robust systems can experience failures with far-reaching consequences.
This is a developing story. Updates will be provided as more information becomes available.
