A widespread outage at Cloudflare on November 18, 2025, temporarily knocked out large parts of the internet, affecting platforms like X and ChatGPT. The issue stemmed from a spike in unusual traffic caused by an oversized configuration file, leading to a software crash. Cloudflare implemented a fix, restoring most services, though some dashboard access issues lingered.
The outage began Tuesday morning, November 18, 2025, when Cloudflare experienced an internal service degradation. According to the company's status page, “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, “Some customers may be still experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard.”
A Cloudflare spokesperson explained to Ars Technica that the problem arose from “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services,” which caused errors in traffic passing through the network. Further investigation revealed “the root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services.” The spokesperson emphasized, “To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity.”
Cloudflare protects about 20 percent of the web's traffic. The disruption impacted major sites including Amazon, Spotify, Zoom, Uber, and Azure, as reported by DownDetector. “We expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post-incident, but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours,” the spokesperson added. Acknowledging the impact, they stated, “Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. We will learn from today’s incident and improve.”
The incident follows an Amazon Web Services outage last month that affected half the web and the CrowdStrike outage last year, both estimated to cost billions. Critics highlight the fragility of internet reliance on few providers, prompting some to consider diversifying services. Cloudflare's stock fell about 3 percent during the event. The company plans updates on its status page and a blog post later that day.