Cloudflare down, problems worldwide from social networks to various services and websites

According to information available today, November 18, 2025, Cloudflare, a vital provider of Internet infrastructure and security, experienced a massive global service outage that resulted in widespread failure to access countless online services. The incident began around 11:20 GMT (12:20 CET), causing a global wave of disruption that affected key digital platforms across North America, Europe, and Asia.

The main symptom of the outage was the appearance of HTTP 500 Internal Server Error messages that were displayed to users trying to access millions of websites that use Cloudflare's network.

Cloudflare immediately admitted that the problem was located internally on their network, confirming that their own infrastructure management tools — the Cloudflare Dashboard and API — were also affected.

While a formal root cause analysis (RCA) of the issue is still under investigation, Cloudflare has preliminarily identified the trigger as a "surge in unusual traffic" directed at one of their internal services. This uncontrolled internal event caused cascading errors in the routing system.

Among the platforms that suffered significant outages were X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI (ChatGPT), Spotify, Canva, and many other major platforms. Ironically, even Downdetector, an outage tracking platform, was temporarily unavailable due to its reliance on the affected infrastructure.

The incident, which occurred just a month after a major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), has once again highlighted the systemic risk that comes with the extreme centralization of key components of the modern internet.

The first reports of the issues emerged around 11:20 GMT. Shortly after the detection, Cloudflare issued a status update, confirming that it was investigating the issue affecting multiple customers, marked by the aforementioned 500 errors, Cloudflare said, adding that its engineering teams responded quickly, resulting in a gradual recovery of services.

However, Cloudflare warned that customers may continue to see "higher than normal error rates" while remediation efforts continue. Part of the emergency measures included temporarily disabling specific services in the affected regions, such as the WARP encryption service in London, to ensure the flow of essential traffic.

It is interesting to note that Cloudflare had maintenance scheduled in several data centers (Tahiti, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Santiago, Chile) on the same day. Although the company did not initially confirm a direct link between the scheduled maintenance and the global outage, the history of major Internet outages often indicates that configuration changes or traffic rerouting are related to internal errors.

The dominance of HTTP 500 errors and the simultaneous failure of the Cloudflare Dashboard and API strongly suggest that the failure primarily occurred in the Control Plane of Cloudflare's global network. The control plane is a critical component that manages the configuration, routing, traffic distribution and general status of all over 330 Cloudflare data centers worldwide.
When the Control Plane fails (which manifests as the Dashboard and API being unavailable), the distributed system loses the ability to receive correct instructions for routing traffic. In such conditions, Cloudflare's edge servers don't know how to properly process the request or communicate with the client's origin servers, which leads to a generic 500 error — a sign that the server itself (in this case, Cloudflare's) encountered an unexpected internal condition. If the problem were simply reaching the client's origin server, we would see a number of specific errors like 521 (Web Server Down) or 522 (Connection Timeout).

Overcoming the 500 error is therefore evidence that the system failure was deeper, potentially caused by a configuration error or uncontrolled internal traffic (self-starting) caused by a "spike in unusual traffic" that overloaded critical network services, according to Cloudflare.

To be clear, Cloudflare is much more than just a content delivery network (CDN) provider; It is a fundamental cloud-based platform for security, performance, and serverless computing. It acts as a reverse proxy between a website's hosting provider and end users. Its key role is to optimize content delivery while providing robust protection against cyber threats.