Cloudflare Suffers Massive Global Outage: X, ChatGPT, and Thousands of Websites Go Dark
The internet experienced a seismic disruption on November 18, 2025, when Cloudflare, the web infrastructure giant powering millions of websites globally, suffered a major outage that rippled across the digital landscape. Users attempting to access platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, League of Legends, and thousands of other websites were met with frustrating error messages and loading screens that never resolved.
The Scale of Disruption
The outage began at approximately 11:20 UTC (early morning PST) when Cloudflare's global network started experiencing critical issues. Within minutes, user reports surged across alternative platforms as people realized they couldn't access their favorite websites and services. The incident affected an estimated 50-100 million users worldwide, making it one of the most significant internet disruptions of 2025.
Cloudflare's own status page initially struggled to stay online, ironically becoming one of the casualties of its own infrastructure problems. This left many users in the dark about the scope and severity of the issue. The company confirmed the incident with a statement acknowledging "widespread 500 errors" affecting multiple customers and noting that even their dashboard and API were failing.
Major Platforms Hit Hard
The outage's footprint was vast and impacted services across multiple categories. Social media giant X (Twitter) experienced intermittent outages, with users unable to load timelines or post updates. OpenAI's ChatGPT suffered from what the company described as "intermittent access issues" caused by "an issue with one of our third-party service providers".
Beyond these high-profile platforms, the disruption extended to e-commerce sites built on Shopify, online gaming platforms like League of Legends and RuneScape, design tools like Canva, travel booking platforms, payment gateways, and even 3D printing communities like Printables and Thangs. Early estimates suggest e-commerce losses alone reached $500-800 million in the first two hours, with broader productivity impacts potentially pushing global economic losses to $2-5 billion.
What Caused the Outage?
According to Cloudflare's official statement, the company detected "a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare's services beginning at 11:20 UTC". This unexpected traffic surge caused errors for traffic passing through Cloudflare's network, though the company initially stated they did not know the exact cause of the spike.
Later reports revealed that the hours-long global outage was traced to a single configuration file, highlighting how even minor technical issues can cascade into major internet disruptions when they affect critical infrastructure. The incident affected multiple layers of Cloudflare's infrastructure, including CDN delivery, DNS resolution, reverse proxy services, bot detection and captcha systems, Web Application Firewall (WAF), and edge network routing.
Global Impact and Recovery
The outage wasn't regional—it affected Cloudflare's global network spanning over 330 cities across more than 120 countries. Users in North America (Detroit, Anchorage), Europe (Izmir, Amsterdam, Berlin, Frankfurt), Asia (Astana, Malé), Latin America (Bogotá, La Paz), and Africa (Kinshasa, Windhoek) all reported significant service disruptions.
Cloudflare's engineering team worked urgently to identify and mitigate the problem. By 12:21 UTC, partial recovery began with the company announcing they were "seeing services recover," though customers continued to observe higher-than-normal error rates. The company re-enabled WARP access and gradually restored other services throughout the morning, with most services reaching 95% recovery by 14:00 UTC.
Lessons for Website Owners
This incident underscores the risks of internet infrastructure centralization. While Cloudflare provides essential services including DDoS protection, content delivery, and security features to millions of websites, relying on a single provider creates a potential single point of failure. Sites with DNS directly pointed to their domain registrar or hosting provider (such as AWS Route 53) that didn't route through Cloudflare's proxy layer were able to bypass the issue entirely.
Website owners are advised to review their Cloudflare dashboard logs for anomalies, purge caches if content seems stale post-recovery, test Workers and Pages deployments, and consider implementing traffic steering for automatic failover to prevent future disruptions.
Looking Forward
As of late morning on November 18, 2025, most Cloudflare services have been restored, though the company continues monitoring for any residual issues. Cloudflare has promised a more in-depth analysis and postmortem report to be published on their blog once the full investigation is complete.
This outage serves as a stark reminder of how interconnected and dependent modern internet infrastructure has become, and how a single point of failure can cascade into global disruptions affecting millions of users and billions of dollars in economic activity