A “significant outage” at major internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare briefly knocked out a large number of high-profile websites and services globally, including X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT, on Tuesday. The disruption began shortly after 11:30 GMT, leading to thousands of user reports on outage monitoring sites.
Cloudflare, which provides security and network services to an estimated 20% of all websites worldwide, apologized for the service failure. The company explained that the outage was triggered by a technical error: a configuration file, intended to manage threat traffic, did not function correctly and “triggered a crash” in the software handling traffic for its wider services. The firm was quick to clarify that there was no evidence of a cyberattack or malicious activity causing the disruption.
Cloudflare went down early this morning, causing half the internet to go offline.
Major platforms like Twitter/X, ChatGPT (OpenAI), Spotify, Facebook, Telegram, League of Legends, Letterboxd, and others were affected. pic.twitter.com/tNUaGGxNib
— FearBuck (@FearedBuck) November 18, 2025
The sweeping effects of the downtime highlighted Cloudflare’s critical role in the web ecosystem, leading experts to describe the company as one of the internet’s “largest single points of failure.” Sites like Zoom, Canva, and even the outage-monitoring site Downdetector itself were impacted.
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The incident follows recent outages affecting other tech giants like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, reinforcing concerns among cybersecurity experts about the global reliance on a few “fragile networks” for core internet hosting and security. Cloudflare’s share price saw a drop shortly after the incident was resolved.
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