On Tuesday morning, November 18, 2025, vast swaths of the internet ground to a halt as Cloudflare—one of the world’s largest content delivery networks and security providers—suffered a major global outage starting around 11:20 UTC (6:20 a.m. ET). Users encountered widespread 500 errors and “Cloudflare is having issues” messages when trying to access popular sites, including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, Shopify, Discord, League of Legends, Grindr, Anthropic’s Claude, and even outage tracker Downdetector itself. The disruption, which peaked with tens of thousands of reports on monitoring sites, affected millions worldwide, highlighting the fragility of modern web infrastructure despite years of technological advancement.

Cloudflare quickly acknowledged the problem on its status page, describing it as an “internal service degradation” with no evidence of a cyberattack. The root cause was traced to an automatically generated configuration file for managing threat traffic that unexpectedly ballooned in size, crashing key software systems. Engineers deployed a fix within hours, declaring the incident resolved by around 14:30 UTC, though some residual dashboard access issues lingered. Company executives, including CTO Dane Knecht, issued blunt apologies, admitting the outage was “unacceptable” given Cloudflare’s role in routing about 20% of global web traffic.

This event underscores a harsh reality: even in 2025, the internet remains shockingly centralized and vulnerable to single points of failure. Cloudflare, often called “the biggest company you’ve never heard of,” protects and accelerates millions of websites, but when it falters—as it did here due to a latent software bug triggered by routine changes—the ripple effects are catastrophic. Similar outages at providers like AWS last month remind us that cost efficiencies and performance gains from relying on a handful of mega-providers come at the price of resilience; true decentralization remains elusive in an era dominated by cloud giants.