Cloudflare Down??
Cloudflare đź’Ą How the Recent Outage Crashed Parts of the Internet
The recent incident on Tuesday, November 18, 2025, caused widespread service degradation because so many major platforms rely on Cloudflare’s network for security and content delivery.
- Technical Issue: Cloudflare confirmed an “internal service degradation” impacting its global network services, leading to “widespread 500 errors” and issues with its own Dashboard and API.
- The Reverse Proxy Failure: Since Cloudflare acts as a reverse proxy, when its systems fail, the user’s request is often stopped at the Cloudflare network layer, preventing it from ever reaching the website’s original server.
- Widespread Impact: Websites using Cloudflare were unable to load or function correctly. Affected users saw generic messages pointing to an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network.”
- Major Platforms Hit: The outage immediately affected a large number of high-traffic services, demonstrating Cloudflare’s centrality to the internet, including:
- X (formerly Twitter): Users reported being unable to log in, load feeds, or access the mobile app.
- OpenAI (ChatGPT): Widespread issues with the chatbot and its APIs.
- Spotify: Users reported problems with the mobile app and service access.
- Other Sites: Canva, Perplexity, Letterboxd, and even the outage-tracking website Downdetector were also impacted intermittently.
The outage proved that when a foundational infrastructure layer like Cloudflare faces a technical issue, the resulting cascading failure can effectively bring large segments of the global internet to a halt.
You can watch this video to understand why Cloudflare is so critical and how its outages can impact so many major platforms at once: Cloudflare outage hits these major platforms. Which sites are down? See complete list of services affected.
🛡️ What is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is a global internet infrastructure company that operates as a reverse proxy that sits between a user’s web browser and the origin server (where a website is hosted).3
Its main purpose is to make websites faster, safer, and more reliable using its global network of data centers across hundreds of cities worldwide.4
| Feature | Function | Why It’s Crucial |
| Content Delivery Network (CDN) | Caches (stores) static content (images, JavaScript, CSS) on edge servers close to the user. | Improves speed and performance by reducing the distance data has to travel (low latency). |
| DDoS Mitigation | Absorbs and filters massive volumes of malicious traffic from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. | Protects websites from being taken down by cyberattacks, ensuring uptime. |
| Web Application Firewall (WAF) | Inspects incoming traffic and blocks common web exploits like SQL injection. | Adds a crucial layer of security against hackers. |
| DNS Services | Cloudflare acts as the Domain Name System provider, translating website names (e.g., X.com) into IP addresses. | Enhances reliability and speed of fundamental internet navigation. |
Cloudflare Not Working: How the Infrastructure Failure Affected Websites
The downside is that when Cloudflare runs into trouble, it can bring down countless websites at once, and because its services support such a wide mix of platforms, outages can hit many unrelated websites simultaneously, as per the report.
A similar situation occurred last month when Amazon Web Services, another major internet backbone, suffered an outage that triggered widespread disruption. Like Cloudflare, ..
