A significant service disruption at Cloudflare on 18 November 2025 caused outages across multiple global platforms, including ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter) and Spotify. The outage began early in the day when an internal service degradation triggered traffic errors across the company’s network.
Cloudflare, which manages and secures traffic for around 20 per cent of the web, said the disruption stemmed from an unusual traffic spike around 11:20 UTC that overloaded parts of its system. By mid-afternoon the firm announced that a fix had been deployed and service was returning to normal, though some customers continued to experience elevated error rates.
Platforms reliant on Cloudflare’s infrastructure were among the most visibly affected. Users of ChatGPT and X reported error screens or inability to access the services. Downdetector, the outage-monitoring service, recorded peaks of nearly 5,000 user reports in the early hours, declining significantly as recovery progressed. The disruption extended beyond consumer apps. Sites belonging to retailers, government agencies and financial services were also affected, underscoring how deeply embedded Cloudflare’s systems are in the global internet infrastructure.
Cloudflare clarified that the incident was not traced to malicious cyber-attack activity. Instead, the company said the error was rooted in configuration controls intended to mitigate malicious traffic. A configuration file governing threat mitigation grew beyond expected size limits and triggered a crash in the traffic-handling software, impacting multiple services simultaneously.
Despite the scale of the outage, recovery was fairly swift. By approximately 14:42 UTC most major customer services had begun returning to normal functionality. The company continues to monitor residual issues to ensure full restoration of its network. While service was largely restored, the event served as a reminder of the fragility of the internet’s underlying architecture and the concentration of risk when major infrastructure providers fail.
Industry commentators highlighted that the incident showcases the potential cascading effect when a large internet backbone provider encounters an issue. With many online services depending on common networks and content-delivery systems, a single failure can amplify across sectors and geographies very quickly. Analysts expect organisations to revisit resilience strategies, multi-provider architectures and contingency planning for critical web infrastructure in light of this event.
Cloudflare’s decision not to attribute the outage to any external attack aligns with its statement that the cause related to non-malicious internal configurations. Nevertheless, some observers believe the incident will prompt closer regulatory scrutiny of large-scale internet infrastructure providers, especially since internet-facing services increasingly underpin essential systems such as emergency services, banking platforms and logistics networks.
For users, the outage translated into periods of inability to access services, slow loading times or error screens. Some business customers reported that internal dashboards and application interfaces were inaccessible for hours, illustrating the far-reaching operational impact from what might appear a purely consumer-facing incident.
Cloudflare has committed to a full post-incident investigation and has stated it will publish details once its analysis is complete. Meanwhile, organisations relying on its network are reportedly reviewing fail-safe strategies, including geographic redundancy, alternative DNS providers and independent content-delivery paths.
In summary, the outage at Cloudflare on 18 November 2025 highlights the scale and interdependence of modern digital services. Platforms from ChatGPT to X and various enterprise sites were disrupted because many organisations continue to rely on a small number of infrastructure vendors. While rapid recovery reflects the overall resilience of the internet ecosystem, the event also raises questions about how future disruptions might be contained and prevented.