What Happened on 18 November 2025? Huge Cloudflare Outage Shakes the Internet.
What Happened on 18 November 2025? Huge Cloudflare Outage Shakes the Internet.
On 18 November 2025, Cloudflare, one of the largest internet infrastructure providers in the world, experienced a massive outage, and diverse globally used systems (including Chatgpt, X (Twitter), Spotify, Canva), and several news websites started failing. The event took several hours and revealed the extent of overreliance of the contemporary internet on a small number of backbone providers.
Here we deconstruct what happened, the effect of the outage, and the lessons that should be learned by the businesses.
What Exactly Happened?
Cloudflare claimed in its official report that the outage was initiated around 11:20 UTC or approximately when an important element of its network systems broke down because of an internal bug.
Root Cause
This occurred when Cloudflare changed the permissions of its internal database, which led to a feature file that was part of its Bot Management system to increase by 2x in size against expectation.
This oversized file spread throughout servers of Cloudflare around the world and finally hit the limits of the system causing a massive failure of:
Traffic routing
Content delivery (CDN)
Security features
API handling
This caused the error messages such as: to be viewed by the users around the world.
“Connection timed out”
“Host unreachable”
“Error 520/524”
Cloudflare declared that this was not a cyberattack but a technical issue that happened as a result of an inadvertent software update.
International Implication: Large Scale Online Extinction.
The attack impacted many parts of the internet since Cloudflare is a middle ground in the functioning of the contemporary web since it offers CDN, security, caching and DDoS protection to millions of websites.
Impacted platforms included:
1 - Chatgpt – system outages and downtimes.
2 - X (previously Twitter) – problems with loading timelines.
3 - Spotify – connectivity drops
4 - Canva – failure to log in as well as design loading.
5 - News channels/source-monitoring websites - such as Downdetector.
There are many e-commerce, SaaS, fintech, and gaming applications.
Even Downdetector, the site which is used to monitor the outage losses, was offline as it relies on Cloudflare as well.
At approximately 14:30 UTC, Cloudflare was putting the normal operations back to normal following the implementation of fixes and corrupt files clearance.
Why This Outage Matters
Cloudflare processes a large percentage of web traffic internationally. In case a central provider such as Cloudflare goes offline, it has a domino effect on the internet.
Major Reasons why this Incident is concerning.
1. Internet single points of failures.
There are numerous websites who use Cloudflare to perform several tasks, in case of the failure of a single provider, it pulls large portions of the web with it.
2. Increasing Web Infrastructure Complicacy.
The current internet networks are very intertwined. Even the misconfiguration of one software can spread around the world at minutes.
3. Increasing Reliance on Artificial Intelligence and High-Traffic Networks.
As an increasing number of AI services, streaming, fintech, and e-commerce emerge, infrastructure provider stability is more than ever before.
4. Companies should have improved Failover.
Companies should remember that this blackmail is a powerful lesson:
What Companies ought to do at this moment.
This experience is a wake up call, in case your business is based on Cloudflare or any similar provider. These are the things you should take into account:
Total outages may be avoided by using Cloudflare along with another CDN (Akamai, Fastly, AWS CloudFront).
✔ Incident Response Preparedness Review.
Teams should have:
Clear communication plans
Monitoring tools
Cloud instances and backup servers.
✔ Evaluate Dependencies
Some of the companies do not even know how many tools in their stack use Cloudflare indirectly.
✔ Be In the Know with the Cloudflare Post-Mortem.
Cloudflare will publish a technical breakdown of measures implemented that will ensure that it does not happen again.
Conclusion
Cloudflare outage that happened on November 18, 2025 is one of the biggest internet outages that affected millions of users globally in the recent past. Although services have resumed normalcy, the incident indicates the vulnerability of the core infrastructure of the internet and businesses urgently require a level of resilience within their system.
With the ongoing expansion of the digital realm, it will be necessary to have strong, redundant, and fault-tolerant systems to avoid such massive outage in the future.
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