On November 18, 2025, a significant internet outage impacted numerous online services globally, including major platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT. The disruption was traced to Cloudflare, a widely used internet infrastructure company that provides services to enhance website speed, security, and reliability.
The outage began around 6:30 AM Eastern time, with reports spiking around 8:30 AM and lasting until nearly noon Eastern time. During this period, users experienced widespread issues accessing affected platforms, encountering error messages and slow loading times. Cloudflare acknowledged the issue, stating that they were investigating an internal service degradation that was impacting multiple customers, causing widespread 500 errors, and affecting the Cloudflare Dashboard and API.
The incident highlights the internet's reliance on a small number of key infrastructure providers like Cloudflare. Cloudflare operates as a reverse proxy, sitting between website servers and users. When a user tries to access a website that uses Cloudflare, the request is routed to the nearest Cloudflare server, which then retrieves the content from the origin server. This helps protect the website from traffic overload and provides users with faster response times. However, when Cloudflare experiences an issue, it can lead to widespread disruptions across the internet.
The outage affected a diverse range of online services, including social media, AI platforms, gaming, and even transit systems. Besides X and ChatGPT, other platforms impacted included League of Legends, Spotify, Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, and New Jersey Transit. Even Downdetector, a website that tracks outages, was temporarily affected. Some users noted that Google Gemini remained operational during the Cloudflare outage.
Cloudflare engineers worked to address the issue and implemented a fix that they believed had resolved the incident around 10 a.m. ET. The company continued to monitor the situation to ensure that there were no further problems. By 9:34 a.m. ET, Cloudflare reported that they had deployed a change that restored dashboard services but were still working to remediate broad application services impact.
While the immediate cause of the "latent bug" was not disclosed, the incident underscores the importance of robust and resilient internet infrastructure. Similar outages have occurred in the past, including a recent Microsoft Azure cloud portal outage and a massive Amazon cloud computing service outage in October. These incidents highlight the potential for single points of failure to disrupt a wide range of online services. As the internet becomes increasingly critical to daily life, ensuring the stability and reliability of its underlying infrastructure is paramount.
