By Harshit, SAN FRANCISCO / GLOBAL, November 18, 2025 — 9:51 AM EDT
A major disruption rippled across the global internet on Tuesday as Cloudflare, one of the world’s most widely used internet infrastructure and security providers, suffered a technical outage, leaving millions of users unable to access high-profile platforms from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to the social network X (formerly Twitter).
The failure, which Cloudflare eventually identified as an “internal service degradation” stemming from issues around scheduled maintenance and traffic re-routing, has reignited a critical debate about the risks of centralizing the web’s core functionality in the hands of a few dominant technology giants.
Widespread Chaos and Irony
Reports of the outage began circulating around 11:30 AM UTC (5:00 PM IST), with users across continents, especially in India, reporting widespread “Error 500” messages—a generic indicator of a server-side problem on Cloudflare’s network.
The scale of the disruption was highlighted by a moment of digital irony: Downdetector, the primary website used globally to track internet outages, briefly crashed itself due to its reliance on Cloudflare’s infrastructure. As the site flickered back online, data showed a massive spike in error reports for a long list of services:
- Social Media: X (Twitter), Spotify
- AI Platforms: OpenAI (ChatGPT), Perplexity
- Enterprise/Creative: Canva, Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase
For a period, some website owners were unable to reach their performance dashboards or APIs, compounding the difficulty in tracking and mitigating the crisis.
What Happened and Cloudflare’s Response
Cloudflare, often described as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of,” sits as a critical layer between end-users and millions of websites, providing security against threats like DDoS attacks and speeding up performance as a Content Delivery Network (CDN). When a core fault hits its systems, the effects cascade instantly across unrelated services.
Cloudflare confirmed the incident and began remediation efforts immediately. In its status updates, the company noted it had to temporarily disable certain services for users in the UK during the fix deployment.
A spokesperson later stated:
“We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services… That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
By late Tuesday evening (IST), Cloudflare confirmed partial recovery, noting, “We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates.” However, the company cautioned that customers may continue to observe “higher-than-normal error rates” as full service restoration continues.
The Cloud Monoculture Debate Intensifies
This Cloudflare event follows closely on the heels of a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) collapse barely four weeks prior, which also took down giants like Reddit and Fortnite.
These back-to-back failures have reignited strong warnings from cybersecurity experts about the fragility of the modern internet and the risks posed by the “cloud monoculture.”
Prof Alan Woodward of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security echoed the general sentiment:
“These incidents are a stark reminder of our digital dependency. When a few massive companies provide the infrastructure for the global internet, their failures become systemic.”
Governments, enterprises, and activists are increasingly demanding greater transparency, redundancy, and a clearer pathway to developing sovereign cloud infrastructure to reduce reliance on foreign-owned cloud giants—a debate that is now front and center as the cleanup from the Cloudflare outage begins.
Would you like me to search for the final status or the official root cause report from Cloudflare regarding this outage?