November 18, 2025 — A major outage at internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare brought down thousands of websites and services worldwide on Tuesday morning, disrupting everything from social media platforms and AI chatbots to fast-food ordering systems and daycare check-in apps. The incident, which lasted approximately four hours, highlights the internet's fragility when centralized infrastructure fails.
The Cascading Failure
The disruption began at approximately 11:20 UTC (6:20 AM Eastern) when Cloudflare's network experienced what the company described as “significant failures to deliver core network traffic.” Users attempting to access affected websites were greeted with HTTP 500 “Internal Server Error” messages, indicating problems within Cloudflare's infrastructure rather than the destination websites themselves.
According to Cloudflare's official statement, the outage was triggered by a database permissions change that caused a “feature file” used by the company's Bot Management system to unexpectedly double in size. When this oversized configuration file propagated across Cloudflare's global network, it crashed the software systems responsible for routing traffic.
“Given Cloudflare's importance in the Internet ecosystem, any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable,” the company stated in its post-mortem analysis. “That there was a period of time where our network was not able to route traffic is deeply painful to every member of our team.”
Cloudflare emphasized that the incident was not caused by a cyberattack or malicious activity, despite initial speculation about an “unusual traffic spike” that coincided with the outage.
Major Platforms Affected
The scope of the disruption was staggering, affecting some of the internet's most-trafficked platforms:
Social Media: Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) suffered widespread outages, with users encountering “Something went wrong. Try reloading” messages. DownDetector logged over 9,700 outage reports for X at the peak of the incident.
AI Services: OpenAI's ChatGPT experienced what the company described as “intermittent access issues” caused by “an issue with one of our third-party service providers.” Anthropic's Claude chatbot was similarly affected, leaving AI-dependent workflows paralyzed.
E-Commerce and Services: Shopify, Indeed, Uber, Uber Eats, and PayPal all experienced disruptions. President Donald Trump's Truth Social platform also went offline during the incident.
News and Media: Multiple news agencies, including regional outlets and tech journalism sites like The Register, Notebookcheck, and Videocardz displayed error messages when users attempted to access them.
Gaming: Popular titles including RuneScape, League of Legends, and Valorant experienced connection problems, with players unable to log in or access game wikis.
Everyday Services: Perhaps most striking were reports of disruptions to mundane daily activities—McDonald's self-service kiosks displayed error messages, daycare facilities reverted to paper check-in systems, and employees couldn't access HR portals to request time off.
User Reactions: Frustration and Dark Humor
The outage sparked immediate reactions across social media platforms that remained accessible. Reddit's r/CloudFlare community became a hub for real-time user reports, troubleshooting attempts, and gallows humor about the situation.
“Even my local McDonald is broken lol,” posted one Reddit user, sharing a photo of a Cloudflare error message displayed on a fast-food ordering kiosk—a stark illustration of how deeply internet infrastructure has penetrated everyday life.
Another user lamented: “My kid's daycare reverted to the 1990's. While they usually use tablets connected to an app parents can look at to check kids in and out (and also food and diapers), they're doing everything by hand.”
The irony wasn't lost on users that DownDetector itself—the platform millions use to check if services are down—was also affected by the Cloudflare outage, making it difficult to track the full extent of the disruption. “Can't find out if Cloudflare is down because Cloudflare being down has taken out DownDetector, along with half the internet,” one user quipped on social media.
Technical communities on Hacker News praised Cloudflare's transparency in its post-mortem analysis, with one commenter noting: “As a visitor to random web pages, I definitely appreciated this—much better than their completely false ‘checking the security of your connection' message.”
However, the incident also sparked serious discussions about internet infrastructure centralization. Multiple users expressed concern that so much of the web depends on a handful of providers, creating single points of failure with massive impact.
“This is what happens when half the internet routes through three companies,” wrote one Reddit user. “We need better redundancy and decentralization.”
The Technical Root Cause
According to Cloudflare's detailed post-mortem, the outage stemmed from a seemingly routine operation gone wrong. The company's Bot Management system uses a machine learning model to generate “bot scores” for every request traversing its network, helping customers control which automated traffic can access their sites.
This system relies on a “feature configuration file” that gets refreshed every few minutes and published across Cloudflare's entire global network. The rapid rollout allows Cloudflare to react quickly to new bot attacks and changing traffic patterns.
On November 18, a database permissions change caused the system to output multiple duplicate entries into this feature file, causing it to balloon to twice its expected size. When this oversized file propagated to the machines handling traffic routing, the software couldn't process it correctly and crashed.
The cascading effect was immediate and severe. Cloudflare's network-wide monitoring showed a dramatic spike in HTTP 5xx errors—the technical indicator of server-side failures—starting at 11:20 UTC.
“The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our Bot Management system up to date with ever changing threats,” Cloudflare explained. When that software encountered the malformed file, it failed, taking down routing capabilities across the network.
Recovery Timeline
Cloudflare's response followed a familiar pattern for major infrastructure outages:
11:20 UTC (6:20 AM ET): Initial outage begins ~12:00 UTC (7:00 AM ET): First widespread user reports appear on social media 12:03 UTC (7:03 AM ET): Cloudflare acknowledges the issue on its status page 13:35 UTC (8:35 AM ET): Company reports continuing work on fixes 14:22 UTC (9:22 AM ET): Cloudflare states it's “seeing services recover” but warns of continued elevated error rates 14:57 UTC (9:57 AM ET): Company implements fix and declares issue resolved, though some users may still experience dashboard access issues
The recovery wasn't smooth or immediate. Multiple Reddit users reported that services would briefly come back online, only to fail again minutes later—a pattern consistent with network-wide routing issues being gradually remediated across Cloudflare's distributed infrastructure.
“Several Reddit users said the network came back temporarily, then failed again minutes later. This suggests an ongoing global routing or proxy pipeline issue—not a quick fix,” noted one technical analysis of the incident.
Business and Economic Impact
The financial ramifications were swift. Cloudflare's stock price dropped more than 2% as news of the outage spread, reflecting investor concerns about reliability and potential customer churn.
For businesses dependent on Cloudflare's services, the four-hour disruption translated directly into lost revenue. E-commerce platforms couldn't process orders, advertising networks couldn't serve ads, and SaaS companies couldn't deliver their services to paying customers.
“Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable,” a company spokesperson told media outlets. “We apologize to our customers and the internet in general for letting you down today.”
The incident comes at a particularly sensitive time for Cloudflare, which handles approximately 81 million HTTP requests per second on average. The company has built its reputation on reliability, performance, and protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks—just two months prior, Cloudflare successfully defended against a record-setting 11.5 terabits-per-second DDoS attack.
A Pattern of Infrastructure Failures
Tuesday's Cloudflare outage is the latest in a troubling series of major internet infrastructure disruptions. Less than a month earlier, Amazon Web Services suffered a daylong outage that prevented millions of people from performing simple tasks like ordering coffee through apps or managing smart home devices.
Days after the AWS incident, Microsoft's Azure cloud platform and Office 365 services experienced a global outage, compounding the sense that critical internet infrastructure is increasingly fragile.
“That there have been three widespread outages in less than a month is a coincidence,” said Eileen Haggerty, area vice president at cybersecurity firm Netscout. “But it certainly feels like these outages are happening more often, mostly because of the scale of their impact.”
According to Cisco's ThousandEyes network monitoring service, there have been 12 major outages in 2025 so far—not including Tuesday's Cloudflare disruption. While the number of outages has remained relatively consistent over time, the impact has magnified dramatically as more services and websites depend on centralized infrastructure providers.
“The number of service outages has remained consistent, but the number of sites and applications dependent on these services has increased, making them more disruptive to users,” Angelique Medina, head of internet intelligence at Cisco ThousandEyes, explained.
The consolidation of critical cloud infrastructure among just a few major providers—Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), Google (Cloud Platform), and Cloudflare—creates enormous efficiency and economies of scale but also introduces catastrophic single points of failure.
The Centralization Dilemma
The Cloudflare incident starkly illustrates a fundamental tension in modern internet architecture. Centralized infrastructure providers offer compelling benefits: advanced DDoS protection, global content delivery networks, automated security updates, and economies of scale that individual websites couldn't achieve alone.
Cloudflare alone protects and accelerates millions of websites, making the internet faster and more secure for billions of users. However, this concentration of services means that when Cloudflare experiences problems, the impact radiates across a substantial portion of the accessible internet.
“It really almost doesn't matter how well-situated the provider is in these cases, or even how sophisticated the IT organization and infrastructure is for a private business,” Haggerty noted. “Tech disruptions like these are very, very common problems.”
The architecture creates a paradox: the same centralization that protects against distributed attacks and performance problems also creates vulnerability to centralized failures. When Cloudflare's Bot Management system crashed, it didn't matter that individual websites' servers remained operational—users couldn't reach them because the proxy layer in between had failed.
Lessons and Future Implications
Cloudflare has committed to implementing changes to prevent similar outages, though the company hasn't yet detailed specific technical measures beyond general promises to “build new, more resilient systems.”
“When we've had outages in the past, it's always led to us building new, more resilient systems,” the company stated. “On behalf of the entire team at Cloudflare, I would like to apologize for the pain we caused the Internet today.”
Dane Knecht, Cloudflare's chief technology officer, acknowledged the severity in a post on X: “A routine configuration change caused a bug to crash, which cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today.”
For businesses and organizations dependent on cloud infrastructure, Tuesday's incident reinforces several critical lessons:
Redundancy matters: Organizations with fallback systems and multi-cloud strategies experienced less severe disruptions than those entirely dependent on Cloudflare.
Testing limitations: Even sophisticated automated systems can fail in unexpected ways, and no amount of pre-production testing can replicate the full complexity of production environments.
Communication is crucial: Cloudflare's relatively transparent and timely communication during the incident helped manage customer expectations, even if it couldn't prevent the disruption.
Dependency mapping: Many organizations only discovered their dependence on Cloudflare when services failed, highlighting the need for better visibility into infrastructure dependencies.
Looking Ahead
As internet services become increasingly central to daily life—from ordering food to managing daycare check-ins—the stakes of infrastructure failures continue rising. Tuesday's outage affected not just tech enthusiasts and businesses but ordinary people trying to accomplish routine tasks.
The incident also raises questions about internet resilience and the wisdom of continued consolidation among infrastructure providers. While no immediate regulatory responses have been announced, the pattern of recurring major outages affecting millions of users may eventually prompt government scrutiny of critical internet infrastructure.
For now, websites and services have largely recovered, McDonald's ordering kiosks are functioning again, and daycares have put away their paper sign-in sheets. But the vulnerability revealed on November 18, 2025, won't be forgotten quickly—either by frustrated users who lost hours of productivity or by the Cloudflare engineers working to ensure it never happens again.
As one Reddit user philosophically noted amid the chaos: “At least we got a reminder that the internet is held together with duct tape and prayer. Maybe keep that physical backup plan handy.”
This article will be updated as additional information becomes available regarding Cloudflare's remediation efforts and long-term infrastructure improvements.
