Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Major Websites Worldwide

On November 18, 2025, a significant outage at Cloudflare, a leading web infrastructure and security company, led to widespread disruptions across numerous major websites and online services. The incident began around 6:40 a.m. ET, with Cloudflare reporting internal service degradation.

The outage affected a range of platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI's ChatGPT, Canva, Spotify, and Discord. Users attempting to access these services encountered error messages or experienced slow loading times.

Cloudflare identified the root cause as an oversized configuration file automatically generated to manage threat traffic, which unexpectedly grew too large. A spokesperson for Cloudflare confirmed this issue as the source of the outage.

By 9:50 a.m. ET, Cloudflare announced that a fix had been implemented and services were beginning to recover. The company stated, "We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors."

This incident underscores the internet's reliance on intermediary services like Cloudflare, which optimize and secure web content delivery. Similar recent outages have occurred with other major cloud service providers, highlighting vulnerabilities in digital infrastructure.