As of 14:42 UTC (9:42 AM EST), Cloudflare says it has rolled out a fix for the incident and is "continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal." The company also said that some customers might still have issues accessing or using the Cloudflare dashboard. The team is working on another fix and will roll it out as soon as possible. Cloudflare's CTO, Dane Knecht, explained in a post on X that a hidden bug in a service supporting their bot mitigation system began to crash after a routine configuration change. He said this led to major slowdowns across Cloudflare’s network and other services, but confirmed it was not an attack.
I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I…November 18, 2025
What you need to know
- Cloudflare—a key internet infrastructure provider—has suffered a catastrophic outage, taking down a massive portion of the global web.
- The issue was confirmed as a global problem involving "widespread 500 errors" and an "internal server error."
- The meltdown immediately crippled major services, including X, OpenAI's ChatGPT, creative platform Canva, and popular online games like League of Legends.
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The internet is usually a mess, but today, November 18, 2025, it stopped functioning as a utility and became a high-stakes, global comedy of errors.
At about 6:00 am ET, a large part of the internet went down. The reason was Cloudflare, a company that supplies key network infrastructure for many websites. So when it chokes, the digital world stops breathing.
Visitors trying to load everything from X to the film reviewing site Letterboxd were greeted with the universally dreaded "internal server error on Cloudflare's network."
Cloudflare confirmed that this was a global issue with “widespread 500 errors.” To make matters worse, the company’s own reporting tools and API also stopped working, so the team trying to fix the problem lost access to their usual resources.
The casualties roster was huge, proving just how deeply Cloudflare is embedded in our daily lives. Not only did social platforms go down, but AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT also stopped working. Creative professionals could not use Canva, and popular online games such as League of Legends were also offline.
One of the most ironic parts of this outage was that services meant to track internet problems, such as Downdetector, were also affected. When the website that is supposed to report outages is down too, it shows how serious the situation is.
Cloudflare admitted the problem was serious, saying it was "investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers." The company did not give a clear reason, but it is worth noting that Cloudflare had planned maintenance at its Santiago (SCL) data center that same day, from 12:00 to 15:00 UTC.
This outage is similar to past major disruptions, like the well-known Amazon Web Services (AWS) failures. And it shows how much the modern internet depends on a few central infrastructure providers. Early reports said the situation improved in places like the UK, but US users soon saw more error reports.
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