474/68 Wednesday, November 19, 2025
On November 18, 2025, internet users around the world were unable to access numerous websites and applications due to a major outage at Cloudflare-one of the world’s largest internet infrastructure providers, handling roughly 20% of global internet traffic. Dane Knecht, Cloudflare’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), explained that the incident stemmed from a latent bug that was triggered following a routine configuration change in the company’s Bot Mitigation service. This caused a cascading failure across Cloudflare’s network. He emphasized firmly that the incident “was not a cyberattack.”
The impact spread rapidly because Cloudflare functions as a backbone for millions of websites. Major services and platforms-including ChatGPT, Canva, Uber, Shopify, Discord, X (formerly Twitter), as well as various streaming and online gaming services-experienced outages or became completely inaccessible. Even Downdetector, the website used to track internet service outages, faced issues during the incident. This event highlighted the fragility of today’s internet infrastructure, which relies heavily on a small number of major providers-creating critical chokepoints where a single point of failure can lead to widespread disruption.
Cloudflare has since confirmed that mitigation efforts were successful and that the situation has largely stabilized, although some users may still encounter lingering issues such as slow load times or intermittent login failures. This marks the second major outage of a key internet infrastructure provider within a short period-following AWS’s major incident the month before. As a result, IT experts are urging organizations to adopt resilient-by-design architectures, reduce dependency on a single cloud provider, and implement multi-path routing or failover strategies to minimize the impact of future outages.
Source https://hackread.com/cloudflare-outage-jolts-internet-who-was-hit/
