On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare—one of the internet’s biggest behind the-scenes players suffered a widespread outage that knocked thousands of websites and apps offline for hours. If you’ve been struggling to load X (formerly Twitter), use ChatGPT, or access other popular services today, you’re not alone. This Cloudflare downtime caused HTTP 500 errors across the globe, affecting everything from social media to gaming and e-commerce.
What Happened During the Cloudflare Outage on November 18, 2025?
The trouble started around 11:48 UTC (early morning in the US) when Cloudflare’s global network began experiencing severe issues. Users everywhere saw classic “500 Internal Server Error” messages, and even Cloudflare’s own dashboard and API stopped working properly.
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Cloudflare quickly posted on their status page: “We are aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing. We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem.”
Ironically, outage-tracking sites like DownDetector were hit too—making it harder for people to report problems at first!
Websites and Services Affected by the Cloudflare Outage
Cloudflare powers security, speed, and reliability for about 20% of the web, so when it goes down, the ripple effects are massive. Some of the biggest names impacted included:
- X (Twitter): Intermittent loading issues and error messages for millions of users.
- OpenAI/ChatGPT: Partial outages, with many unable to access the AI chatbot.
- PayPal and Uber Eats: Problems with payments and orders.
- Gaming platforms: League of Legends, Valorant, and others reported connection failures.
- Other sites: Spotify, Amazon services, Grindr, Canva, and countless e-commerce and news websites showed Cloudflare error pages.
DownDetector logged thousands of reports within minutes, with spikes for X alone topping 10,000 complaints.
Was the Cloudflare Outage Caused by a Malware or Cyber Attack?
Social media was buzzing with rumors of a malware attack or hack, but there’s no evidence to support that. Cloudflare and cybersecurity experts have described it purely as a technical issue with their global network—no malicious activity mentioned in official updates. As of now, it’s just speculation. We’ll update if any confirmed details emerge.
Cloudflare Response and Recovery Timeline
The team at Cloudflare jumped on it fast, providing regular updates on their status page. By early afternoon UTC, they reported: “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
There was some scheduled maintenance happening in their Santiago (SCL) data center around the same time, but it’s unclear if that played a role. Most services started coming back online within a couple of hours, though some lingering glitches persisted into the evening.
Why Cloudflare Outages Hit the Internet So Hard
This isn’t the first big internet blackout—remember the recent AWS issues?—but it drives home how much the modern web depends on a few key providers like Cloudflare. One glitch, and suddenly unrelated sites from gaming to banking go dark at the same time.
Latest Updates on Cloudflare Status (As of November 18, 2025)
Services are largely restored, but if you’re still seeing errors, it could be residual. Check Cloudflare’s official status page for real-time info: cloudflarestatus.com.
If this affected you, hang tight—things should be back to normal soon. These outages are frustrating, but they usually get fixed quickly. Stay tuned for any post-mortem report from Cloudflare on the exact root cause!
