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Illustration of a Cloudflare outage affecting X and ChatGPT, showing a user facing an error screen amid global disruption.
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Cloudflare outage disrupts X and ChatGPT access

Reported by AI Image generated by AI

Cloudflare suffered a major outage on November 18, 2025, rendering millions of websites worldwide, including X and ChatGPT, inaccessible for about three hours. The company confirmed the issue stemmed from an old bug triggered by a routine configuration change, not a cyber attack. Cloudflare apologized for the global impact on customers.

Cloudflare engineers have encountered significant challenges in expanding their use of soft-unicast functionality within the Linux networking stack, driven by complex routing and anycast configurations for redundancy. Attempts to bypass limitations using advanced socket options ultimately led back to a simpler proxy solution. The experience highlights the difficulties in customizing Linux for high-scale networking demands.

Reported by AI

A major outage at Cloudflare on November 18, 2025, disrupted numerous websites and services, initially mistaken for a massive DDoS attack. The issue stemmed from an internal database change that doubled the size of a critical feature file used in the company's bot management system. Cloudflare resolved the problem by reverting to a previous file version, though full recovery took additional time due to surging traffic.

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