Human
SAN FRANCISCO:lobal internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare experienced a major outage on 18 November 2025 that disrupted websites and apps across the world before services were restored later that day.
The company reported that a spike in unspecified "unusual traffic" began around 11:20 UTC, triggering elevated error rates across its network. Platforms including X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT were among those affected, while website-traffic monitoring service DownDetector logged a surge in reports.
At 14:30 UTC, Cloudflare announced the incident was resolved and said a fix had been implemented. The firm said it would continue monitoring services and later publish a detailed root-cause analysis.
Though the exact cause remains under investigation, experts cited by The Guardian said a cyber-attack was "unlikely," pointing instead to a system fault in one of Cloudflare's internal configuration processes. The outage once again spotlighted the dependence of a large portion of the internet on a small number of infrastructure providers.
In a statement, Cloudflare wrote: "To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity... Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. "
