A major outage at internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare on Tuesday, November 18, 2025, briefly knocked parts of the web offline worldwide, disrupting access to high-profile services including X (Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, and popular gaming and financial platforms.
Cloudflare, whose systems provide security and performance for a lot of websites confirmed the outage on its status page claiming that it was investigating an issue affecting “multiple customers”, with users hit by widespread HTTP 500 “internal server error” messages.
Outage trackers such as Downdetector showed sharp spikes in complaints from users who could not load X timelines, access ChatGPT or log into services like League of Legends, Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, Moody’s and NJ Transit systems.
Issues Under Control
In an update, Cloudflare said it had identified the issue and was deploying a fix, describing the incident as a problem within its own network rather than with individual customer sites. The company reported a “spike in unusual traffic” to one of its services, which triggered errors for some traffic passing through its global network.
As part of its remediation efforts, Cloudflare temporarily disabled certain services in London, including its WARP encrypted browsing service, before later saying these had largely recovered and that error levels were returning to normal. However, it warned that some customers might still see higher-than-normal error rates while work continued.
Cloudflare has not yet given a full technical post-mortem, but has said engineers are “all hands on deck” to keep traffic flowing and will turn to investigating the root cause once stability is fully restored.
