Cloudflare Outage Hits Major Sites Globally

Outage

On Nov 18, 2025, Cloudflare - a key internet infrastructure provider - suffered a global outage, disrupting access to many major websites and services.

Impact

High-profile platforms like X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Canva, and online games like League of Legends reported wide-spread 500 error messages.

Scale

Hundreds of websites relying on Cloudflare’s CDN and security services were affected, showing just how central Cloudflare is to modern internet infrastructure.

Error Type

Users across affected sites encountered “500 Internal Server Error” messages, suggesting a server-side failure at Cloudflare's edge network.

Cause

Cloudflare reported a massive spike in CPU usage causing failures in primary and secondary systems, as the root issue behind the outage. :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}

Recovery

Within about 30 minutes, Cloudflare said it had mitigated the issue by shutting down the faulty process, and traffic began to restore. :contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2}

Investigation

Cloudflare continues to investigate fully, even after partial recovery. Customers may still see elevated error rates during remediation. :contentReference[oaicite:3]{index=3}

Maintenance

The outage coincided with scheduled maintenance at data-centres in locations like Santiago, Los Angeles and Tahiti, though Cloudflare hasn’t confirmed a direct link. :contentReference[oaicite:4]{index=4}

Vulnerability

Experts warn that such outages expose a risky centralization: too much of the internet trusts too few infrastructure providers. :contentReference[oaicite:5]{index=5}

User Voice

Users on Reddit report panic and confusion - from website owners unable to manage dashboards to general users seeing widespread “Cloudflare is down” errors. :contentReference[oaicite:6]{index=6}