Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Major Internet Services Globally
A significant, widespread outage at Cloudflare is causing major disruption across the internet today, Tuesday, November 18, 2025. The incident, which began around 11:00 UTC, has rendered numerous high-profile websites and services, including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, and Canva, inaccessible for thousands of users globally.
Cloudflare, a key provider of content delivery network (CDN) and internet security services, confirmed it is investigating the issue, which is resulting in "widespread error" messages across affected platforms.
Impact on Global Services
The outage's effect is far-reaching because Cloudflare's infrastructure acts as a critical "gatekeeper" for a substantial portion of web traffic. When its services fail, the impact cascades to all the websites and applications that rely on its network for performance and protection against cyber attacks.
Affected services currently include:
Social Media: X (formerly Twitter)
AI & Productivity Tools: ChatGPT, OpenAI, Canva
Communication Platforms: Zoom
Government Services: Several electronic visa (e-Visa) application portals for countries like Saudi Arabia, Kenya, and Thailand are inaccessible.
Ironically, even some outage tracking websites like Downdetector were temporarily affected, as they also use Cloudflare's services. Users attempting to access affected sites are typically met with "internal server error on Cloudflare's network" messages or other connection failures.
Current Status and Technical Details
Cloudflare is actively working to mitigate the problem. The company's status page indicates services are beginning to recover, but customers may still experience higher-than-normal error rates.
In an attempt to stabilize services, Cloudflare temporarily disabled its WARP encryption service in London. The company has made configuration changes that have allowed some services like Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover, with error levels returning to normal for those specific features.
While the exact root cause is still under investigation, a spokesperson noted they saw a "spike in unusual traffic" to one of their services shortly before the outage began. Experts suggest the sheer number of core infrastructure providers in the internet landscape is small, meaning that when one experiences an issue, the effects are immediately global and highly visible.
For live updates and specific service status, users can check the official Cloudflare Status page.
A Growing Trend of Infrastructure Outages
This incident follows a similar high-profile global outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) just a month ago, which also brought down thousands of sites. The frequency and impact of these outages highlight the fragility of the internet's centralized infrastructure and the immense dependency on a few key technology companies.
Previous Cloudflare incidents have been attributed to various issues, including faulty code deployments, misconfigurations, and third-party vendor failures. The company has historically provided detailed post-mortems on its blog to explain the technical causes of major incidents and the steps taken to prevent recurrence.