Major Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Internet Services Worldwide

November 18, 2025 – A significant service disruption at Cloudflare this morning sent ripples across the internet, affecting some of the world’s most popular platforms and services. Here’s what happened and what it means for users.

What Happened?

Starting at approximately 6:20 AM Eastern Time (11:20 UTC), Cloudflare experienced an unusual spike in traffic to one of its core services. This unexpected surge triggered widespread errors that cascaded across numerous websites and applications that rely on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.

For those unfamiliar, Cloudflare is a critical internet infrastructure company that provides content delivery, security, and performance services to millions of websites worldwide. When Cloudflare experiences issues, the impact is felt across a substantial portion of the internet.

Which Services Were Affected?

The outage had a broad reach, impacting both consumer-facing applications and enterprise services:

Major Platforms:

• X (formerly Twitter) – Users reported difficulty accessing the social media platform
• OpenAI services – Both ChatGPT and the newly launched Sora experienced disruptions
• McDonald’s – Self-service ordering kiosks went offline in multiple locations
• League of Legends – Gamers faced connectivity issues
• Downdetector – Ironically, even the outage-tracking website itself was affected

The widespread nature of these disruptions highlighted just how integral Cloudflare’s services have become to modern internet infrastructure.

Market Impact

The outage didn’t just affect users – it hit Cloudflare’s bottom line as well. The company’s shares dropped more than 5% in premarket trading as news of the incident spread, reflecting investor concerns about the stability and reliability of critical internet infrastructure.

Current Status and Resolution

The good news? Cloudflare’s engineering team moved quickly to address the issue. According to their status updates:

• The root cause has been identified
• A fix has been implemented and deployed
• Error rates for Access and WARP users have returned to normal pre-incident levels
• WARP access in London, which was temporarily disabled, has been re-enabled

However, Cloudflare has cautioned that some customers may continue to experience higher-than-normal error rates as the remediation process completes across their global network.

What This Means for the Internet

This incident serves as a stark reminder of the internet’s centralized dependencies. While Cloudflare provides invaluable services that make the web faster and more secure, outages like this demonstrate the risks of relying heavily on a small number of infrastructure providers.

For businesses, this is a wake-up call to:

• Diversify infrastructure dependencies where possible
• Implement robust monitoring and failover systems
• Develop incident response plans for third-party service disruptions
• Consider multi-CDN strategies for critical applications

For everyday users, it’s a glimpse behind the curtain at the complex infrastructure that powers our daily digital experiences.

Looking Ahead

Cloudflare has a strong track record of transparency and rapid incident response. The company maintains a public status page where users can monitor ongoing issues and post-incident reports. As the situation continues to stabilize, expect a detailed post-mortem from Cloudflare explaining the technical details of what went wrong and the measures they’re taking to prevent similar incidents in the future.

For now, most services appear to be returning to normal operation, but if you’re still experiencing issues with Cloudflare-dependent services, patience and periodic retries are recommended as the fixes propagate through their global network.