Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Major Websites and Services

On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare, a leading internet infrastructure company, experienced a significant outage that disrupted numerous major websites and services worldwide. Affected platforms included X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI's ChatGPT, Shopify, and Indeed. The outage also impacted gaming services like League of Legends and Valorant, as well as transit systems such as New Jersey Transit and France's SNCF.

Cloudflare reported that the issue began around 6:20 a.m. ET, attributing the disruption to a spike in unusual traffic, which led to network errors. A spokesperson stated, "We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors."

By 10:40 a.m. ET, Cloudflare announced that most problems were resolved, although some residual disruptions remained. The company continues to monitor the situation to ensure full restoration of services.

This incident follows other recent outages in major cloud services, including disruptions in Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure, highlighting the internet's reliance on a few key infrastructure providers.