Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Major Websites Including X and ChatGPT

On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare, a leading internet infrastructure provider, experienced a significant outage that disrupted numerous major websites and services worldwide. The incident began around 6:20 AM ET, with users reporting difficulties accessing platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Spotify.

Cloudflare acknowledged the issue, stating they were investigating an internal service degradation affecting multiple customers. By 9:34 AM ET, the company reported that dashboard services had been restored, though broader application services were still impacted.

The outage was attributed to an automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic, which grew beyond its expected size and triggered a crash in the software system handling traffic for several services.

By 10:00 AM ET, Cloudflare announced that a fix had been implemented and the incident was believed to be resolved.

This event underscores the critical role of internet infrastructure providers and the widespread impact that technical issues can have on global web services.