November 18, 2025: a widespread technical issue at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare caused significant disruption across the web, temporarily taking down numerous popular websites and online services around the globe.
The outage began at approximately 11:48 UTC (around 11:48 am UK time / 6:48 am ET) and resulted in widespread error messages for users attempting to access affected platforms.
Visitors to major services, including the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), the film-reviewing site Letterboxd, the design platform Canva, and even the outage-tracking website Down Detector, were confronted with error pages. The disruption also extended to critical services such as OpenAI, temporarily blocking access to ChatGPT, as well as popular multiplayer video games like League of Legends.
Cloudflare is a vital internet infrastructure company, providing services such as content delivery, DDoS protection, bot management, and traffic routing – technologies that are usually invisible to end-users. The company acknowledged the problem shortly after it began, confirming that multiple products across its global network were affected.
In a series of updates, Cloudflare stated that it was “aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers.” The company later confirmed that the issue had been identified and a fix was deployed, with services gradually recovering throughout the afternoon.
During the incident, users reported a range of error messages, including “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network,” intermittent authentication failures, and security-challenge loops. Some services, such as Cloudflare WARP and dashboard access, experienced region-specific disruptions, including temporary service disablement in London during remediation efforts.
By 19:28 UTC, Cloudflare declared the incident fully resolved, stating that error rates and latency had returned to normal levels. The company advised customers that it was safe to re-enable any services that had been temporarily disabled and noted that a full post-incident investigation would follow.
The outage once again highlighted the modern internet’s heavy reliance on a small number of core infrastructure providers. The incident occurred only weeks after a separate large-scale disruption involving Amazon Web Services, reinforcing concerns about systemic risk when critical backbone services experience failures.
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