Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Major Internet Services
A significant disruption at the web infrastructure company Cloudflare on November 18, 2025, caused widespread outages across the internet. The incident made numerous popular websites and online services inaccessible for several hours. Users worldwide were met with “internal server error” messages when trying to access a variety of platforms.
The problem was identified as a global issue stemming from an internal service degradation within Cloudflare’s network. This resulted in what the company described as “widespread 500 errors,” a generic message indicating a server-side problem. The outage was so extensive that even Cloudflare’s own status page and internal monitoring tools were affected, complicating early remediation efforts.
The list of affected services highlighted the internet’s deep reliance on Cloudflare’s network. Major platforms such as the social media site X, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and the music streaming service Spotify were impacted. The disruption also affected popular online games like League of Legends, creative platforms like Canva, and even outage tracking websites like Downdetector, which ironically also depends on Cloudflare’s infrastructure. Other services including Discord, Uber, and various crypto platforms also experienced downtime.
Cloudflare began investigating the issue around 11:48 UTC. By 13:09 UTC, the company had identified the root cause and started implementing a fix. Services began a gradual recovery, with platforms like Cloudflare Access and WARP being among the first to be restored. By approximately 14:42 UTC, Cloudflare announced that a fix had been fully deployed and that it considered the incident resolved. However, the company continued to monitor its network to address any lingering issues, such as difficulties some users had accessing the Cloudflare dashboard. By later in the day, most major affected services, including X and ChatGPT, appeared to be functioning normally again for users.
