Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure company, experienced a broad outage on 18 November 2025 that left many high-traffic websites and apps partially or wholly inaccessible for a few hours.
The company began reporting internal service degradation around 11:20–11:48 UTC and posted status updates as engineers investigated.
Cloudflare said the incident followed a sudden surge of unusual traffic and that its teams deployed a fix in the afternoon; by roughly 14:30–14:42 UTC the company reported the immediate problem had been addressed and that it was monitoring recovery.
During the outage users reported 500-style errors, blank pages and failed connections. Reported service impacts included X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Canva, Spotify, Uber, BitMEX, parts of NJ Transit’s web services, and some government sites.
Cloudflare’s own dashboard and some APIs were also affected, and Downdetector and other trackers showed a sharp rise in user reports while the incident was ongoing.
Cloudflare publicly stated there was no evidence the outage was the result of a cyberattack. In its initial account the company cited the spike in unusual traffic as the immediate trigger.
Reporting from the Financial Times and other outlets added that an unusually large configuration file interacting with a software bug in bot- and threat-handling logic appeared to play a role; Cloudflare said it would publish a detailed post-mortem.
News organizations covering the event noted the outage produced a noticeable spike in user reports and that Cloudflare’s status updates and public messaging were the primary sources of real-time information during the incident.
Financial reporting indicated a modest decline in Cloudflare’s share price following the outage.
Cloudflare apologized for the disruption and said it would publish a fuller technical post-mortem explaining the precise root cause and the steps the company will take to prevent a recurrence.
In the meantime many affected services recovered after the fix was deployed and Cloudflare continued to monitor traffic and system behavior.
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