Have you ever been visiting a favorite site and noticed that you are presented with a strange error message? That will be the case of many others everywhere in the world on November 18, 2025. Several trending websites such as ChatGPT, X (which used to be Twitter), and Spotify simply stopped operating normally.
It was not the fault of such websites. One such company is Cloudflare that assists in driving the larger portion of the internet. Cloudflare is a company that you may have never heard of, but one that you surely use daily unless you are aware of it!
So, why did Cloudflare go down? The one-word answer is software bug a tiny error in their computer code made one significant file become oversized that started a domino of issues. What I mean by that is simple enough.
What Exactly is Cloudflare?
Before we delve into the issues of what went wrong, it is important to discuss what Cloudflare actually does. Imagine the internet as a street city. And your computer uses these internet roads to reach your desired Web site. Imagine Cloudflare now as:
An armed guard that checks on all the people who come in.
Super-fast delivery service, which brings the websites to you in a quick way.
Cloudflare is a company, which has the services to make websites quicker, safer, and more dependable. They possess what are known as Content Delivery Network (CDN). This is a network of computers everywhere in the world, which store duplicates of website contents. Once you visit a site, the copy of the computer nearest to you is given to you thus the site will load faster.
Cloudflare has approximately 20 percent of all websites using the services. That is why, when Cloudflare does not work well, so many various sites become unavailable simultaneously!
What Went Wrong in the Cloudflare Outage?
The Timeline of Events
To see the time when things occurred, we can consider November 18, 2025 (which is a global time standard, UTC):
Those who attempted to access the sites of affected websites during outage received various error messages. Some received the error code HTTP 5xx (also known as the technical term server error), and others received a message requesting them to unblock challenges.cloudflare.com.
What Services were Impacted?
The effect of the Cloudflare outage was extensive. The following are some of the problematic services:
The Real Reason: Why Cloudflare Went down?
Let us now proceed to the million dollar question; what was the cause of this massive internet failure?
The Simple Explanation
Cloudflare has a specific system, Bot Management. This system is used to distinguish between the actual human visitors and computer programs (also known as bots) that may be attempting to cause havoc.
This Bot Management system is configured with a special configuration file (as a recipe or instruction sheet) which contains what it searches. This file normally remains in a similar size .
On November 18, Cloudflare technician altered the permissions (who access what) in one of their database systems. This was equating to altering the regulations in a library concerning who is entitled to which books.
This permission change made the database to make similar data into that significant configuration file. suppose that you were making a list of shopping, and then you saw that each item was two or three times on it--the list would be a good long one! This is what happened to the file of Cloudflare.
The file expanded approximately two times its usual size . The computers were perplexed when they attempted to read this extra large file and crashed due to lack of expectation of such a large file!
What Made the Problem Tricky?
This failure was particularly perplexing since it did not occur at the same moment. The websites would be working one time and not the next. The reason is that the defective file was being created after every 5 minutes and at one point it would be of the proper size whereas in another instance it would be overly large.
This false start-stop action first made Cloudflake engineers believe that they were facing a hyper-scale DDoS attack (where bad guys attempt to flood a site with excessive traffic).
The Greater Lesson: What Does This Teach Us?
Internet Reliability and Centralization.
This failure is a valuable lesson of how the internet functions nowadays. The internet is dominated by very few large corporations such as Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
A problem with one of these companies impacts a great number of websites simultaneously. Already within a month before the incident, three major outages of various providers had transpired. This causes some professionals to be concerned that we are relying on too many on too few companies.
According to David Choffnes, a professor of computer science at Northeastern University: We now have AWS, Azure and Cloudflare failures within the month. That represents a very huge share of the largest cloud providers globally" .
It Wasn't an Attack
One should understand that no cyberattack or malicious activity occurred to make the Cloudflare outage. It was what we refer to as an operational issue- a mistake that occurred in the normal work.
This is as opposed to when websites crash due to attack by hackers. This was rather like a person falling over a power cord as opposed to a person cutting the power cord at purpose.
What Do You Think Happened to the Cloudflare Outage?
Cloudflare engineers made efforts to resolve the issue. Here's what they did:
What Do We Do To Prevent Future Outages?
When this kind of thing occurs, companies such as Cloudflare strive to ensure that it does not occur again. Cloudflare has stated that they are going to:
Frequently Asked Questions
Why Did Cloudflare Go Down?
Cloudflare crashed due to a programming error. Their systems crashed because a change in their database permissions resulted in an important file in their system being too big.
How Long Was Cloudflare Down?
The total duration of the major outage was approximately three hours between 11:20 AM and 2:30 PM UTC. There were certain secondary problems which would have taken more time to completely resolve, the whole thing was fixed by 5:06 PM UTC.
Did Hackers cause the Cloudflare Outage?
No, Cloudflare has ensured that it has no evidence that this was an effect of an attack or any malicious activity. It was a technical problem within the company.
What Web sites were impacted by the Cloudflare outage?
Popular sites (including X (Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, Zoom, Canva and the Cloudflare status page itself ) were impacted, too.
Are Internet Failures such as this the norm?
Although personal companies may experience minor problems on an individual basis, it is not as frequent that large-scale outage of numerous large sites simultaneously occurs. Nonetheless, it has witnessed several significant outages in recent years by other providers, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
The Bottom Line
The internet is a wonderful yet complex system. In some cases, even minor mistakes may have a tremendous impact when they occur in significant locations. The Cloudflare outage of November 2025 was among such instances a minor technical failure that temporarily crippled the web to a large extent.
The positive thing is that firms get to learn through such events and do what they can to ensure that their systems become stronger after such events. As such, we may find outages here and there, but the internet as a whole is becoming more reliable.
Read Also : Is there favoritism on Dancing With the Stars toward Whitney Leavitt — and if so, why?
Karl Jablonski
Have you ever been visiting a favorite site and noticed that you are presented with a strange error message? That will be the case of many others everywhere in the world on November 18, 2025. Several trending websites such as ChatGPT, X (which used to be Twitter), and Spotify simply stopped operating normally.
It was not the fault of such websites. One such company is Cloudflare that assists in driving the larger portion of the internet. Cloudflare is a company that you may have never heard of, but one that you surely use daily unless you are aware of it!
So, why did Cloudflare go down? The one-word answer is software bug a tiny error in their computer code made one significant file become oversized that started a domino of issues. What I mean by that is simple enough.
What Exactly is Cloudflare?
Before we delve into the issues of what went wrong, it is important to discuss what Cloudflare actually does. Imagine the internet as a street city. And your computer uses these internet roads to reach your desired Web site. Imagine Cloudflare now as:
An armed guard that checks on all the people who come in.
Super-fast delivery service, which brings the websites to you in a quick way.
Cloudflare is a company, which has the services to make websites quicker, safer, and more dependable. They possess what are known as Content Delivery Network (CDN). This is a network of computers everywhere in the world, which store duplicates of website contents. Once you visit a site, the copy of the computer nearest to you is given to you thus the site will load faster.
Cloudflare has approximately 20 percent of all websites using the services. That is why, when Cloudflare does not work well, so many various sites become unavailable simultaneously!
What Went Wrong in the Cloudflare Outage?
The Timeline of Events
To see the time when things occurred, we can consider November 18, 2025 (which is a global time standard, UTC):
Those who attempted to access the sites of affected websites during outage received various error messages. Some received the error code HTTP 5xx (also known as the technical term server error), and others received a message requesting them to unblock challenges.cloudflare.com.
What Services were Impacted?
The effect of the Cloudflare outage was extensive. The following are some of the problematic services:
The Real Reason: Why Cloudflare Went down?
Let us now proceed to the million dollar question; what was the cause of this massive internet failure?
The Simple Explanation
Cloudflare has a specific system, Bot Management. This system is used to distinguish between the actual human visitors and computer programs (also known as bots) that may be attempting to cause havoc.
This Bot Management system is configured with a special configuration file (as a recipe or instruction sheet) which contains what it searches. This file normally remains in a similar size .
On November 18, Cloudflare technician altered the permissions (who access what) in one of their database systems. This was equating to altering the regulations in a library concerning who is entitled to which books.
This permission change made the database to make similar data into that significant configuration file. suppose that you were making a list of shopping, and then you saw that each item was two or three times on it--the list would be a good long one! This is what happened to the file of Cloudflare.
The file expanded approximately two times its usual size . The computers were perplexed when they attempted to read this extra large file and crashed due to lack of expectation of such a large file!
What Made the Problem Tricky?
This failure was particularly perplexing since it did not occur at the same moment. The websites would be working one time and not the next. The reason is that the defective file was being created after every 5 minutes and at one point it would be of the proper size whereas in another instance it would be overly large.
This false start-stop action first made Cloudflake engineers believe that they were facing a hyper-scale DDoS attack (where bad guys attempt to flood a site with excessive traffic).
The Greater Lesson: What Does This Teach Us?
Internet Reliability and Centralization.
This failure is a valuable lesson of how the internet functions nowadays. The internet is dominated by very few large corporations such as Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
A problem with one of these companies impacts a great number of websites simultaneously. Already within a month before the incident, three major outages of various providers had transpired. This causes some professionals to be concerned that we are relying on too many on too few companies.
According to David Choffnes, a professor of computer science at Northeastern University: We now have AWS, Azure and Cloudflare failures within the month. That represents a very huge share of the largest cloud providers globally" .
It Wasn't an Attack
One should understand that no cyberattack or malicious activity occurred to make the Cloudflare outage. It was what we refer to as an operational issue- a mistake that occurred in the normal work.
This is as opposed to when websites crash due to attack by hackers. This was rather like a person falling over a power cord as opposed to a person cutting the power cord at purpose.
What Do You Think Happened to the Cloudflare Outage?
Cloudflare engineers made efforts to resolve the issue. Here's what they did:
What Do We Do To Prevent Future Outages?
When this kind of thing occurs, companies such as Cloudflare strive to ensure that it does not occur again. Cloudflare has stated that they are going to:
Frequently Asked Questions
Why Did Cloudflare Go Down?
Cloudflare crashed due to a programming error. Their systems crashed because a change in their database permissions resulted in an important file in their system being too big.
How Long Was Cloudflare Down?
The total duration of the major outage was approximately three hours between 11:20 AM and 2:30 PM UTC. There were certain secondary problems which would have taken more time to completely resolve, the whole thing was fixed by 5:06 PM UTC.
Did Hackers cause the Cloudflare Outage?
No, Cloudflare has ensured that it has no evidence that this was an effect of an attack or any malicious activity. It was a technical problem within the company.
What Web sites were impacted by the Cloudflare outage?
Popular sites (including X (Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, Zoom, Canva and the Cloudflare status page itself ) were impacted, too.
Are Internet Failures such as this the norm?
Although personal companies may experience minor problems on an individual basis, it is not as frequent that large-scale outage of numerous large sites simultaneously occurs. Nonetheless, it has witnessed several significant outages in recent years by other providers, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
The Bottom Line
The internet is a wonderful yet complex system. In some cases, even minor mistakes may have a tremendous impact when they occur in significant locations. The Cloudflare outage of November 2025 was among such instances a minor technical failure that temporarily crippled the web to a large extent.
The positive thing is that firms get to learn through such events and do what they can to ensure that their systems become stronger after such events. As such, we may find outages here and there, but the internet as a whole is becoming more reliable.
Read Also : Is there favoritism on Dancing With the Stars toward Whitney Leavitt — and if so, why?