A large-scale operational disruption within the Cloudflare network caused numerous internet services to become inaccessible or severely limited in functionality throughout November 18, 2025.

The failure originated around European noon, severely impacting platforms that rely on Cloudflare’s content delivery network (CDN) and security services. The immediate consequence was widespread difficulty loading pages, images, and posts, affecting millions of users globally. 

Incident began with initial signs contained to the company’s technical support, but within about an hour, the problems spread across the digital infrastructure.

Cloudflare, which provides an essential network, security, and optimization layer for millions of websites, acknowledged the failure and announced that its technical teams were investigating the cause.

Initially, no immediate Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) for resolution could be provided, forcing system administrators and users to patiently await official updates to ascertain the scope and root cause of the incident. 

Among the most visible services that suffered outages were the social network X (formerly Twitter), the popular artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT, and other widely used tools such as Spotify and Canva.

Elon Musk’s social network was one of the most affected, with millions of users reporting that the platform failed to load correctly, making it impossible to post or play videos and images.

In parallel, users of ChatGPT, the AI tool developed by OpenAI, reported access issues and errors when trying to interact with the chatbot. 

The reliance on Cloudflare’s infrastructure was also evident in the video game sector, with reports of League of Legends players unable to start games or log in, and in the financial sector, with reports of issues on virtual wallet platforms.

Even Downdetector, the platform that monitors service outages, was affected, further complicating the estimation of the failure’s real scope. 

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare operates as a reverse proxy, interposing its servers between users and the original web servers.

This allows it to accelerate content delivery by geographically bringing it closer to the user (CDN) and, crucially, enhances security by protecting against malicious attacks such as DDoS, bots, and other threats.

The fact that an interruption in its network can paralyze a significant portion of the internet underscores its critical role in the modern digital infrastructure. 

Company confirmed that it was analyzing the source of the outage and would publish updates as it identified the cause and restored the affected services.

While technicians worked on the restoration, specialists advised users to check the official Cloudflare status page or community reporting sites to confirm the widespread nature of the outage.

Basic user actions—such as reloading, switching browsers, or clearing the cache—were discouraged, as these measures would be ineffective if the problem lay with the Cloudflare infrastructure. 

As the hours of Tuesday progressed, a gradual improvement was observed on some portals and a partial normalization of service, according to tracking reports. However, as of this edition’s deadline, the definitive causes of the failure were unknown, and no technical attribution to a specific error or type of attack was made public.

The immediate consequence was the temporary halt of online activities for millions of users, highlighting the dependence of key services like ChatGPT and X (formerly Twitter) on infrastructure providers like Cloudflare for uninterrupted operation.