Cloudflare Outage Causes Widespread Internet Disruptions

A major technical problem at Cloudflare, the essential internet infrastructure and security company, caused significant outages and service degradation across numerous popular websites and online platforms this morning, Tuesday, November 18, 2025.

The incident, which began around 11:00 UTC (6:00 AM ET), led to what Cloudflare described as "widespread 500 errors" for its customers. A 500-series error indicates a server-side malfunction, showing that the issue was rooted deep within Cloudflare's own systems.

Affected Services

Due to Cloudflare's critical role in content delivery, security (like DDoS protection), and traffic routing for a vast portion of the internet, the impact rippled out quickly. The outage was widespread, affecting many high-profile services and apps, including:

• X (formerly Twitter)

• OpenAI's ChatGPT and other tools

• Canva

• League of Legends and other online games

• Spotify

• bet365

• BrightHR

Users attempting to access these sites often encountered error messages, or in some cases, a prompt to "Please unblock https://www.google.com/search?q=challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed," indicating that the security challenge systems themselves were malfunctioning.

Cloudflare's Response and Remediation

Cloudflare responded quickly to the crisis, acknowledging the "internal service degradation" on its status page shortly after the issue began and stating they were focused on restoring service. Initially, the company reported that its Global Network was experiencing severe issues, noting that both the essential Cloudflare Dashboard and API were failing.

By mid-morning UTC, the company announced a significant breakthrough, confirming that the issue had been identified and a fix was actively being implemented. Subsequent updates provided relief, confirming that services were beginning a phased recovery. Specific services, such as Cloudflare Access and WARP (a privacy tool), were noted to have already returned to pre-incident error rates, signaling significant progress toward full stabilization.