Cloudflare down: What we know about the outage so far
On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare, a critical internet infrastructure provider, experienced a significant outage that caused widespread disruptions across various popular services, apps, and websites. The issues began around 11:20 UTC and were fully resolved by 14:30 UTC, according to the company. Cloudflare attributed the outage to a crash in a software system responsible for managing internet traffic, specifically linked to a configuration file that exceeded its expected size. This incident was not the result of a malicious attack, as confirmed by Cloudflare, which reassured users that the situation was being closely monitored and that they were actively working to restore normal service levels.
During the outage, many high-profile websites and services were affected, including Archive of Our Own, Canva, Spotify, and even OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Users reported various issues, including login difficulties and error messages indicating that they needed to unblock Cloudflare challenges to access certain sites. The scale of the disruption was underscored by the fact that Cloudflare processes an average of 78 million HTTP requests per second, meaning that any issues on their end could ripple out to a vast number of users and services across the internet. This event highlighted the critical role that Cloudflare plays in maintaining internet functionality, as similar outages in the past have also led to significant disruptions for platforms like Twitch and Discord.
As Cloudflare worked to resolve the issues, they communicated regularly with users, providing updates on their status page and promising a detailed analysis of the incident in the near future. The company acknowledged the unacceptable nature of such outages and expressed a commitment to learning from the incident to prevent future occurrences. This situation serves as a reminder of the interconnectedness of online services and the potential for widespread impact when key infrastructure providers face technical difficulties.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM6IsO7mY54
UPDATE Tuesday, Nov. 18, 11:33 a.m. ET:
Cloudflare confirmed it had fully resolved the issue causing
outages on Tuesday
. This morning’s Clouflare outage caused widespread errors across popular services, apps, and websites.
The company wrote in an emailed statement to Mashable that the outages stemmed from
a crash in a software system that handles traffic
, while adding that there was no evidence it was caused by malicious activity.
Read the statement:
“Many of Cloudflare’s services experienced a significant outage today beginning around 11:20 UTC. It was fully resolved at 14:30 UTC. 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.
To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity.
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. A detailed explanation will be posted soon on
blog.cloudflare.com
. 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.”
UPDATE Tuesday, Nov. 18, 10:28 a.m. ET:
It appeared
Cloudflare’s issues
were nearing a full resolution on Tuesday.
“A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved,” read a recent
status update
from the company. “We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”
User-reported issues on
Downdetector
did appear to be quickly falling off. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as Mashable.)
The company noted in a more recent update that some Cloudflare users may still be experiencing login issues, but that it is working on a fix.
UPDATE Tuesday, Nov. 18, 9:18 a.m. ET:
Cloudflare
confirmed it was experiencing serious issues
on Tuesday morning, noting in an emailed statement to Mashable that the root cause appeared to be “a spike in unusual traffic.”
Read the statement from Cloudflare:
We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic. We will post updates to
cloudflarestatus.com
and more in-depth analysis when it is ready to
blog.cloudflare.com
.
The latest
status update
from Cloudflare read that it was “working on restoring service for application services customers.”
The internet appears to be breaking again.
On Tuesday morning, at 11:48 UTC, Cloudflare
confirmed
its global network is
experiencing issues
impacting “multiple customers.”
SEE ALSO:
Cloudflare launches way to charge AI bots for crawling sites
Here’s the full statement published on the site’s status page.
Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues
Investigating – Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers. Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.
Nov 18, 2025 – 11:48 UTC
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Cloudflare is a service that “powers Internet requests for millions of websites and serves 78 million HTTP requests per second on average,” according to its
site
. In short, when Cloudflare has problems, the internet has problems. Users on X are already
reporting issues
, and Down Detector — the site that’s normally a go-to for checking what’s broken and what’s not — appears to be having issues itself. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis owns both Mashable and Down Detector.)
Credit: Downdetector
It’s worth noting this isn’t the first time Cloudflare has experienced major issues.
Large portions of the internet went down back in June due to Cloudflare disruption
, causing
problems for users of Twitch, Etsy, Discord, and Google
.
Which parts of the internet are affected?
Here’s a working list of
all the sites and services affected by the Cloudflare outage
:
Archive of Our Own
Canva
Depop
Downdetector
Grindr
League of Legends
OpenAI / ChatGPT
Spotify
X (Twitter)
‘Please unlock Cloudflare challenges’ error
Many sites impacted by the Cloudflare outage, including
OpenAI.com
, are displaying an error message that reads, “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”
This is a developing story and will be updated as new details emerge.
Featured Video For You
How TikTok is Changing the Music Industry
