Major Cloudflare outage drags the internet down. What we know so far

Hundreds of millions of people across the globe were unable to access the internet after a technical issue impacted services at Cloudflare. The issue was not related to a cyberattack and Cloudflare's CEO apologized for the disruptions, saying "we let the internet down today."

The global network that connects users with websites and apps, first began experiencing what it labeled as an "internal service degradation" at 11:48 GMT.

In its latest series of status page updates, by 14:30 GMT, Cloudflare said “a fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved,” but also noted that the team was still "mitigating several issues that remain post-deployment."

“We continue to see errors and latency improve, but still have reports of intermittent errors. The team continues to monitor the situation as it improves, and looking for ways to accelerate full recovery,” the networking and security services provider said, assuring customers it would be releasing a "full post-incident investigation and details asap."

Cloudflare “powers internet requests for millions of websites” worldwide, serving 81 million HTTP requests per second across its network. The majority of customers have reported server connection and website issues, as well as problems logging in and using the Cloudflare Dashboard.

The status page reveals that various updates are scheduled for Guatemala City, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, and Los Angeles. However, it’s unclear as to whether these updates contributed to the outage.

Due to the outage, Cybernews wasn’t able to access Downdetector, a live reporting platform where users share website disruptions.

This comes just after the colossal AWS outage that affected millions of people across the globe.

While Downdetector was down for millions of users, the service seems to have come back online, showing the scale at which the Cloudflare outage is affecting internet users worldwide.

A range of services including Grindr, X, ChatGPT, Canva, and Spotify are down for thousands of users.

Cybernews can confirm that X was down for a short while. However, it seems that the platform is back online.

Devs are stressed

The developer community were quick to sniff out the Cloudflare problem, with many taking to X to vent their frustrations.

One developer on X, "shydev.eth" asked his community of 26,000 followers whether Cloudflare was down, as he was experiencing problems.

“Is @Cloudflare down or something. I'm facing a lot of issues," the user asked.

is @Cloudflare down or something.
i'm facing a lot of isses

undefined shydev.eth (@shydev69) November 18, 2025

The community were quick to confirm the outage, with notable figures like Robert Scoble simply replying "Yes."

Cloudflare finally identifies the issue, but problems aren't solved

Cloudflare has seemingly identified the issue, which has not been explicitly described, and a fix is being implemented.

However, Cloudflare had to disable WARP access in London, meaning that users in that area who were trying to access the internet will see failure to connect messages.

This only occurred for a short amount of time, as at 13:13 GMT Cloudflare said that it has made changes which will allow Cloudflare access and WARP to recover.

"Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates...we have re-enabled WARP access in London," Cloudflare said via its status page.

Websites still down despite "fix"

While Cloudflare claims to have implemented a fix, thousands of websites are still down for millions of users.

X seems to be struggling as more than 13,500 users have reported issues with the site via Downdetector.

Similarly, people are still reporting issues with ChatGPT, Grindr, and other apps like Character AI.

Experts weigh in, ChatGPT and GPTZero still down

While ChatGPT, GPTZero, and other major websites are still down, experts took the time to weigh in on the major outage affecting all internet users.

Chris Dimitriadis, Chief Global Strategy Officer at ISACA, who coined the term "digital pandemic" last year when the CrowdStrike outage hit said that this outage is "another stark warning of how interconnected and fragile our digital world has become."

Furthermore, Wire CEO Benjamin Schilz said that the Cloudflare outage happening shortly after the major AWS outage shows "how brittle our digital reliance has become."

"Big cloud outages aren't new; similar mass-scale incidents happened in 2017 and 2021, and regional outages occur regularly, and they will certainly happen again," Schilz said.

However, the problem is systemic as the big three (AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft) "provide roughly two-thirds of the underlying infrastructure the digital world runs on."

"This high-dependency, predominantly on US-based providers with virtually no real non-US alternatives offering comparable scale, forces us to fundamentally rethink dependencies and access risk within our internal tech stacks."

"The crucial lesson is that resilience, diversity, and redundancy must always be weighed against convenience when building and deploying digital services," Schilz concludes.

Similarly, Dimitriadis said that "today’s outage is another reminder of the critical need for strong cyber legislation."

"Without stronger safeguards, there should be no doubt, these ‘digital pandemics’ will continue to threaten productivity, trust, and economic stability."

It's fixed, for real now, says Cloudflare

While Cloudflare said that it would be implementing a fix at around 13:00 GMT, issues still persisted.

Now, the compmany has said that "a fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal."

However, customers may still be experiencing the brunt of the outage when trying to log in to the Cloudflare dashboard.

“We are working on a fix to resolve this, and continuing to monitor for any further issues,” Cloudflare said.

How much is the Cloudflare outage costing?

Outages such as this can cause tremendous financial loses to every business that uses the internet, from small businesses to the big leagues.

Website maintenance service provider, SupportMy.Website, told Cybernews the outage could be costing companies anywhere from $5 to $15 billion for every hour of downtime.

Cloudflare powers roughly 19% of all active websites, as well as the websites for 35% of all Fortune 500 companies, the company said.

“Right now, our customers, from major banks to small mom-and-pop businesses, are struggling to do business and fulfill customer requests. From reputation to the bottom line, Cloudflare is one of those systems that businesses don't realize they need or even use sometimes. But when it's down, they feel it," said Jason Long, founder of SupportMy.Website.

According to an in-depth analysis by Parametrix Insurance, the total direct financial losses for Fortune 500 companies (excluding Microsoft) during the CrowdStrike July 2024 outage, in which a failed software patch bricked 8.5 million Windows devices, were estimated at $5.4 billion.

Cloudflare outage affects everyone, even AI girlfriends

As per every digital meltdown, users on social media (the ones that still work) are taking to the platforms to vent their anger.

One user on X said that their AI girlfriend seems to be fading because of the Cloudflare outage.

my ai gf because of cloudflare pic.twitter.com/TDmYRlMSk7

undefined Mads (@MadsPosting) November 18, 2025

“You know it’s a bad Cloudflare outage when it even takes out down detector,” said another user.

you know it’s a bad Cloudflare outage when it even takes out down detector 😅 pic.twitter.com/bAlD5yPybx

undefined Tom Warren (@tomwarren) November 18, 2025

“Lol Cloudflare outage for the 36th time this year ONLY,” said another X user.

Lol Cloudflare outage for the 36th time this year ONLY pic.twitter.com/zVYVTiElYp

undefined Rawasen (@rawasen_) November 18, 2025

Cloudflare outage officially over, cyberattack wasn't to blame

Cloudflare finally announced that it has made a full recovery from the outage that seemingly broke the internet on Tuesday.

The reason for the outage was confirmed by Cloudflare's CEO Matthew Prince, who said that a "bad configuration file" in the Bot Management system was to blame.

The company apologized for the disruptions and specifically said that a cyberattack was not to blame for the widespread outage.

Prince issued a technical post-mortem following the outage and promised system hardening to prevent future technical failures.

"We let the internet down today," Prince said in an X post, "Here's our technical post mortem on what happened."

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