A massive global outage hit internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare on Tuesday, November 18, 2025, bringing down thousands of popular websites and online services. Major platforms including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Discord, and many e-commerce and news sites suddenly became unreachable for millions of users around the world.
Visitors trying to access affected sites were greeted with “500 Internal Server Error” messages or complete connection failures. Cloudflare’s official status page confirmed the problem was caused by a widespread internal issue within its own network, not by external attacks or government restrictions.
The company quickly acknowledged the disruption and stated that engineers were “investigating and working on mitigation.” By early afternoon, Cloudflare reported that services were gradually recovering, though some regions continued to experience high error rates during the recovery process.
Independent internet observatory NetBlocks verified that the incident was global in scope and unrelated to censorship or country-level blocks. Even DownDetector, the popular outage-tracking website, was temporarily impacted, highlighting the far-reaching effects of the breakdown.
Cloudflare powers content delivery, security, and performance for a significant portion of the internet. Tuesday’s incident serves as a reminder of how dependent the online world has become on a small number of backbone providers.
As of publication, most services have returned to normal operation, but Cloudflare has not yet released a detailed root-cause explanation.
