Major Outage Hits Cloudflare, Disrupting Numerous Websites and Applications Worldwide
The American cybersecurity and computing company Cloudflare was hit by a major outage on Tuesday, November 18, 2025, causing significant disruptions to many sites and applications across the globe. Since the morning (UTC time), millions of internet users have been faced with inaccessible or slowed-down sites, often displaying the error message "Internal server error - Error code 500" or "Unlock challenges.cloudflare.com to continue". Cloudflare, based in San Francisco, is a crucial player in the Internet infrastructure, providing content delivery network (CDN) and security services for nearly 20% of the Web. The incident affected a wide range of major online services using its infrastructure, including very popular platforms like X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, and even, ironically, the DownDetector website, which is used to check the status of services. The company quickly acknowledged the issue on its status dashboard, stating that it was "aware and investigating a potential issue affecting multiple customers". Cloudflare's teams were mobilized to identify the exact cause of the outage and deploy a fix.
