A wave of chaos hit the internet on Tuesday (18th Nov, 2025) when major sites like X and ChatGPT suddenly went dark. The culprit? A huge hiccup inside Cloudflare, the company that powers a massive chunk of the web’s infrastructure.
Right after 11:30 GMT, users rushed to Downdetector to report problems, only for Downdetector itself to start glitching too.
What Went Wrong Inside Cloudflare
Cloudflare explained that a configuration file meant to filter threat traffic misfired, crashed their system, and broke traffic handling across multiple services.
The company owned it instantly: “We apologize to our customers and the internet in general for letting you down today.”
They reminded everyone that with the scale of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable. The issue is fixed, but some tools might still feel wobbly as they reboot.
Apps and Platforms That Felt the Shockwave
A long list of apps felt the shockwave, including Zoom, Grindr, Canva and more.
X’s homepage told users its internal server had issues linked to Cloudflare.
ChatGPT showed the message: “Please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed.”
So What Exactly Is Cloudflare?
It is one of the world’s biggest internet security providers, checking whether website visitors are real humans or bots. About 20% of all websites depend on it in some capacity.
Experts React to the Outage
NetBlocks director Alp Toker called the outage a “catastrophic disruption” and pointed out how many sites now sit behind Cloudflare’s protective shield to avoid denial-of-service attacks.
That safety has a downside too. It has made Cloudflare a massive single point of failure.
No Attack Involved, Just a Technical Breakdown
Cloudflare stressed the problem was not an attack or anything malicious. It was a technical breakdown. Even so, its stock dipped around 3% shortly after 15:00 GMT.
A Pattern of Fragile Web Infrastructure
This comes right after Amazon Web Services’ outage last month, which knocked more than 1,000 sites offline, followed by issues at Microsoft Azure.
As ESET’s Jake Moore put it, recent outages show how fragile these giant networks really are. Companies rely heavily on Cloudflare, Microsoft and Amazon because there are not many real alternatives.
