Cloudflare experienced a widespread outage on November 18, 2025 that knocked out a broad array of high‑profile services, including X, ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify, Canva, Dropbox, Coinbase, and many others, as the company’s network was unable to route traffic for roughly 20% of global internet traffic.
The outage was traced to a latent bug in Cloudflare’s bot‑mitigation service that crashed after a routine configuration change. The bug caused a cascading failure that degraded the entire network, affecting services ranging from social media and e‑commerce to gaming and financial platforms.
The incident began at about 6:20 a.m. Eastern Time and was officially resolved by 8:00 a.m. ET, although some services reported a gradual restoration that extended into the morning. A fix was applied at 9:42 a.m. ET, after which traffic began to return to normal levels.
In addition to the high‑profile services, the outage disrupted e‑visa application portals for Saudi Arabia, Kenya, and Thailand, causing significant administrative delays for travelers. The incident coincided with scheduled maintenance at Cloudflare’s Santiago, Chile, Atlanta, and Sydney data centers, which may have compounded the impact on certain customers.
Cloudflare’s stock fell about 3% in morning trading and up to 5% in pre‑market sessions, reflecting investor concern over the company’s operational reliability and the potential erosion of customer trust following a disruption of this magnitude.
In a statement, CTO Dane Knecht apologized for the failure, pledged transparency, and announced a review of safeguards and an investment in additional monitoring to prevent future incidents. He noted that outages of this scale could cost between $5 billion and $15 billion per hour, underscoring the financial stakes for both Cloudflare and its customers.
The outage follows a series of disruptions earlier in 2025, including an R2 storage slowdown in March, a DNS glitch in July, and a “jam” incident with Amazon Web Services in August. These events highlight the vulnerability of the internet’s core infrastructure to single points of failure.
The incident is likely to prompt customers to reassess their reliance on Cloudflare, potentially affecting future contracts and revenue. The company has stated it will review its resilience measures and invest in additional monitoring to mitigate the risk of similar outages in the future.
The broader industry reaction underscores the growing concern over the concentration of internet infrastructure in a handful of providers, with outages at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure recently drawing similar attention to the need for diversified and resilient network architectures.
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