Cloudflare, the web security giant routing about 20% of global internet traffic, faced a major internal service degradation starting around 6:00 AM ET on November 18, 2025.
The issue sparked widespread Error 500 messages and “internal server error” alerts across sites relying on its CDN and protection tools.
Popular services like X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, and multiplayer games including League of Legends and Valorant went offline or loaded sporadically for users worldwide.
Even outage tracker Downdetector briefly failed, highlighting deep dependency on Cloudflare, ironic since users flock there first during problems.
At 6:48 AM ET, Cloudflare posted: “Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers. Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”
By 7:21 AM ET, the company noted services were recovering, though some users might still see errors; WARP encryption access in London was temporarily disabled then quickly re-enabled.
These cascading failures expose the internet’s fragility, much of the digital economy rests on a few providers like Cloudflare, AWS, and Azure.
Recent similar disruptions, including last month’s AWS outage, show how one glitch can halt social media, AI tools, gaming servers, and even payments on PayPal or Uber Eats, costing productivity and revenue in a connected world.
Scheduled maintenance in Cloudflare’s Santiago datacenter coincided with the start, but no link has been confirmed.
Users saw harmless messages like “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed”, a sign Cloudflare’s security checks failed, not that sites were truly down.
