Cloudflare has now moved the incident lower on its status page, placing it beneath upcoming scheduled maintenance. That’s a good sign — it likely means the situation is under control and services should be stabilising.
November 18, 2025 at 8:59 PM
If you’re still having trouble accessing certain services, there’s no need to panic — Cloudflare says it’s continuing to work on the problem.
“Some customers may still be experiencing difficulties logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard,” the company said in an update.
“We’re actively working on a fix and will keep monitoring the situation for any additional issues.”
Several major websites, including X and ChatGPT, experienced widespread outages on Tuesday following an issue involving Cloudflare, one of the internet’s most critical infrastructure providers.
Reports of problems began pouring into the outage-tracking site Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT, as users worldwide struggled to access various platforms and online services.
Cloudflare said it detected “a spike in unusual traffic to one of [its] services beginning at 11:20 UTC,” which triggered errors for traffic moving through its network. The company added that the cause of the sudden traffic surge was still unknown and that its teams were working urgently to restore stability.
As the day went on and many services began to recover, Cloudflare announced that it had “deployed a change which has restored dashboard services.”
During the outage, X displayed a message to some users warning of a server issue linked to an error originating from Cloudflare. ChatGPT users were greeted with a similar notification reading, “Please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed.” The same error message appeared on multiple websites, including Downdetector.
Cloudflare noted earlier on its status dashboard that the disruption “potentially impacts multiple customers.” While the firm later confirmed signs of recovery, it cautioned that some users might still experience increased error rates as remediation continued.
What is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest internet security and performance companies. It provides crucial services such as filtering traffic, protecting websites from bot attacks, and preventing denial-of-service attempts. The company says about 20% of all websites worldwide rely on its infrastructure.
It remains unclear exactly how many websites were affected during Tuesday’s disruption.
Even Downdetector — the platform people rely on to track site outages — displayed errors as users rushed to check reports.
Alp Toker, director of NetBlocks, described the event as a “catastrophic disruption to Cloudflare’s infrastructure,” highlighting the company’s growing role as a protective layer for websites facing malicious traffic. He warned that Cloudflare’s central position on the internet also makes it “one of the internet’s largest single points of failure.”
Tuesday’s incident follows other recent outages involving major cloud providers. Last month, Amazon Web Services experienced an outage, taking more than a thousand sites and apps offline. Shortly afterwards, Microsoft Azure also faced problems.
Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET, said the string of outages shows how dependent companies have become on a small number of massive service providers.
“The outages we’ve seen these last few months have highlighted the fragility of these networks,” he said. “Businesses often rely heavily on Cloudflare, Microsoft, or Amazon for hosting and infrastructure because there simply aren’t many alternatives.”
