Global Cloudflare Outage Affects Multiple Services

On 18th November 2025, global infrastructure provider Cloudflare experienced a significant issue that impacted multiple services around the world. The problem surfaced around 11:48 UTC when the company noted an internal service degradation. The disruption was triggered by an unusual spike in traffic to one of its services, leading to widespread issues such as ‘500 Internal Server Error’ messages and failed dashboards and APIs across several websites. Major platforms including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Discord, Shopify, and Dropbox were affected. At the issue’s peak, nearly 5,000 reports were logged on the outage tracking site Downdetector for X and related platforms. Although Cloudflare started recovering some services by around 12:21 UTC, it warned customers of potential elevated error rates. In a bid to remediate the issue, the company temporarily disabled its ‘Warp’ service in London. With Cloudflare handling over 20% of global web traffic, the outage underscored the heavy reliance many services have on a few infrastructure providers. Currently, it remains unclear whether the traffic spike was malicious or accidental, as investigations are still ongoing.