On November 18 2025 a major Cloudflare service issue caused Cloudflare service degradation and service degradation disrupted key platforms. This degradation disrupted services globally, leading to widespread disrupted services and disrupted services worldwide, highlighting how strongly millions of users and businesses depend on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
Detailed Timeline of the Cloudflare Outage and Recovery Steps
- The outage was first acknowledged by Cloudflare at 11:48 UTC, following widespread HTTP 500 errors and service interruptions reported by users worldwide.[1][3]
- By 12:03 UTC, Cloudflare confirmed a global network degradation impacting Cloudflare Access and WARP services.
- Continuous investigation ensued through 12:53 UTC, with intermittent problems persisting.
- At 13:04 UTC, Cloudflare identified the cause as a configuration file error in traffic management software triggering cascading failures.
- Remediation efforts prioritized Access and WARP services, restoring them by 13:13 UTC; WARP access in London had been temporarily disabled to contain the issue.
- Although partial recovery was achieved, some elevated error rates continued for hours across various regions.
Scope and Impact of the Outage on Major Platforms and Services
Affected platforms included:
- Social media platform X (formerly Twitter)[4]
- ChatGPT and OpenAI API endpoints
- Canva, experiencing project loading errors
- Discord, with voice and messaging disruptions
- Spotify, facing streaming and login difficulties
- Riot Games titles like League of Legends and Valorant, suffering authentication failures[5]
- Cryptocurrency platforms such as Arbiscan and BitMEX
- Betting platforms including Bet365
- Numerous smaller websites like Grammarly and Letterboxd
Even outage-monitoring service Downdetector reported disruptions during the incident.[6]
Technical Cause and Cloudflare’s Transparent Response
Cloudflare explained the outage was triggered by a configuration file designed to manage threat traffic, which malfunctioned and caused critical software crashes across its infrastructure. Importantly, the company confirmed no evidence of malicious activity or cyberattacks was found.[7]
Emergency containment included temporarily disabling specific services such as WARP in London. Cloudflare kept customers updated transparently through their status page and third-party communications, maintaining alternative support channels despite partial portal issues.[8]
Broader Industry Implications and Infrastructure Vulnerabilities Exposed
- Cloudflare serves approximately 20% of global websites, making it a vital but concentrated internet security and traffic management hub.[9]
- This outage underscored the risk of internet centralization, where disruptions at a single provider cascade widely.
- Comparable recent outages of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure illustrate the fragile nature of major web infrastructure.[12]
User Advisory and Unconfirmed Factors Influencing the Outage
- Enterprises should assess risk exposure and consider multi-provider redundancy or backup strategies.[10]
- Scheduled maintenance at data centers in locations like Los Angeles, Atlanta, Santiago, and Tahiti might have compounded challenges, but no confirmed causal link exists; readers should monitor for updates.[11]
- Cloudflare plans a full post-incident forensic report providing detailed root cause analysis and resilience measures.
