Have you ever watched half of your apps stop working at once and thought, “Wait… who pulled the plug on the internet?” Welcome, dear readers, to FreeAstroScience, where we try to make sense of events like the Cloudflare outage that, on 18 November 2025, turned a normal day into a digital traffic jam.
Today we will walk through what happened, why so many services went down together, and what this says about the fragile skeleton of the modern web.
This article is written by FreeAstroScience.com only for you, with the hope that you will stay curious, stay informed, and remember that the sleep of reason breeds monsters.
What happened during the Cloudflare outage?
When did the outage start and how long did it last?
On 18 November 2025, around 12:17 in the early afternoon in Italy, Cloudflare acknowledged “a problem that may be impacting multiple customers” on its global network.
In less than half an hour, around 12:48, that problem turned into what many users experienced as a full‑blown blackout, with a rapid spike in error reports and services timing out or refusing to load.
By about 14:00 local time, Cloudflare said it had identified the issue and was rolling out a fix, warning that users might still see more errors than usual while mitigation was in progress.
At 15:42 Italian time (14:42 UTC), the company reported that a correction had been implemented and considered the incident “resolved,” even though some customers still had trouble accessing the dashboard for a while longer.
So, in practical terms, we are talking about a few intense hours, but those hours hit at the very heart of how many websites and apps work.
For millions of people, it looked like the internet itself was broken, even though the root of the problem lived in one key piece of infrastructure: Cloudflare’s network.
Which websites and apps went down?
During the outage, users around the globe reported issues with X (formerly Twitter), Spotify, Canva, Grindr, League of Legends, and ChatGPT, among many others.
Monitoring services such as Downdetector saw thousands of reports piling up within minutes as people searched “X down,” “Spotify not working,” and “ChatGPT down today.”
Several news outlets confirmed that many of these services either rely directly on Cloudflare for content delivery and security or are indirectly affected by traffic routed through its infrastructure.
Here is a simplified overview of some of the affected services and what users saw:
| Service | Category | Typical user experience |
|---|---|---|
| X (Twitter) | Social network | Feeds not loading, login failures, API errors |
| Spotify | Music streaming | Playback errors, app stuck on loading |
| ChatGPT | AI assistant | Connection errors, “something went wrong” messages |
| Canva | Design platform | Editor not loading, assets failing to appear |
| League of Legends | Online game | Login problems, matchmaking failures, high latency |
For many users this was confusing, since the apps looked unrelated, yet they all shared the same bottleneck: Cloudflare. When that bottleneck clogged, a whole chain of websites and services went offline or became painfully slow, almost like a traffic light system failing in a busy city.
How does Cloudflare actually work?
Why do so many sites use Cloudflare?
Cloudflare acts as a kind of smart middle layer between you and the websites you visit, sitting between your browser and the server that hosts the site.
Its network works as a content delivery network (CDN), a security shield against attacks, and a performance booster that caches content closer to users.
Instead of your request travelling all the way to a single server somewhere far away, it is often handled by the nearest Cloudflare server, which can return cached content in a fraction of a second.
Over the years, this combination of speed, security, and simplicity has made Cloudflare extremely popular with developers and businesses. Estimates suggest that Cloudflare now serves and protects close to 20 percent of all websites worldwide, representing tens of millions of domains. That share means that when Cloudflare suffers a serious incident, the effects do not stay inside one company; ripples are felt across a huge portion of the public internet.
What does Cloudflare protect sites from?
One of Cloudflare’s core jobs is defending sites against DDoS attacks, where attackers flood servers with traffic so they cannot handle normal users.
In early 2025, Cloudflare reported automatically mitigating a record 5.6 Tbps attack based on Mirai‑like malware, without needing manual intervention. [web:10]
In the first half of 2025 alone, its systems blocked around 27.8 million DDoS attacks, more than the total for all of 2024, showing how aggressive online threats have become.
To handle this, Cloudflare uses a global network that learns from attacks against any customer and then applies the lessons to protect everyone.
The longer a site uses Cloudflare, the more the system can optimize filters and rate limits for that specific traffic pattern.
This “shared shield” model is powerful, but it also means that a misconfiguration or failure at the shared layer can impact all those customers at once.
Why can one company break so much of the internet?
What does this outage say about centralization?
The Cloudflare outage arrived less than a month after a major disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS) that hit the US‑East‑1 region and caused global knock‑on effects.
Analyses of that AWS incident showed how many “global” apps still anchor key services—like identity and configuration—to a single, heavily used region. When that region falters, apps everywhere can stumble, even if their main servers sit in completely different parts of the globe.
Cloudflare plays a similar central role, but at the networking edge: traffic from millions of sites passes through its infrastructure for DNS, CDN, and security.
W3Techs and other measurements indicate that roughly a fifth of all websites, and more than 39 million domains, rely on Cloudflare’s services.
So when a major configuration or routing issue hits, the outage does not look like “a vendor problem” from the user’s point of view; it looks like “the internet is down.”
A simple way to think about risk
A lot of us like to think of the internet as a mesh: if one path breaks, traffic simply takes another route.
In reality, social media, streaming, and many AI tools now run through a few shared bottlenecks—CDNs, cloud datacenters, and DNS providers that handle huge amounts of traffic.
From a basic reliability perspective, using independent providers in parallel increases resilience.
If two services have availability (A_1) and (A_2), then a simple model for combined availability when either can serve traffic is:
[ A_{\text{total}} = 1 - (1 - A_1)(1 - A_2) ]
When almost everyone chooses the same provider for cost and convenience, that redundancy disappears, and one outage exposes how “single‑point‑of‑failure” our supposedly distributed network has become. The aha moment here is realizing that what felt like an internet problem was, in many ways, a monoculture problem.
How did people experience the outage in everyday life?
When your online life pauses without warning
For many users, the first sign of trouble was not a technical message from Cloudflare but a song that refused to play, a timeline that stayed blank, or an AI assistant stuck on “loading.” [file:1][web:5]
People searched “Cloudflare down,” “internet outage today,” or “why is Spotify not working,” only to find that they were far from alone.
As a wheelchair user, the feeling of dependence on digital tools is very concrete. From transport booking to health portals to remote work, a surprising chunk of daily autonomy now routes through servers we never see and companies we never voted for. So when a shared provider fails, it is not just entertainment that pauses; for some, it can mean missed telehealth sessions, blocked banking access, or delays in requesting assistance.
Humour, frustration, and a glimpse behind the curtain
On social platforms that were still functioning, users joked that it felt like the internet had decided to take an afternoon nap.
Memes compared the outage to someone tripping over a single cable labeled “entire web,” mixing humour with a thin layer of anxiety.
Underneath the jokes, though, many people were asking serious questions: Who are these companies that hold the keys to our connectivity?
Why does an issue in a San Francisco‑based network company ripple into music apps, social feeds, office tools, and AI assistants on every continent?
Was this a cyberattack or a technical error?
What do we know so far?
At the time of writing, public reports from Cloudflare and early media coverage describe the November 18 incident as a major technical problem on their global network, not as a confirmed, successful external attack. The company indicated that it had identified the issue and was implementing a fix, while several outlets stressed that details on the exact root cause were still limited.
Some security commentators pointed out that the timing followed a period of intense attack activity on large infrastructure providers, including Cloudflare’s mitigation of record‑breaking DDoS events.
Others highlighted that configuration errors, routing mistakes, or software rollouts can also trigger large‑scale outages, even in highly redundant systems.
So, for now, the honest answer is that we know the impact and the timeline very well, but the complete technical story is still being pieced together.
This uncertainty is not a weakness; clear acknowledgement of “we are still investigating” is exactly what we should expect from serious infrastructure providers.
What does this reveal about the fragility of the internet?
Lessons from Cloudflare and AWS
In October 2025, the AWS US‑East‑1 outage showed how concentrating critical services in a single cloud region can cascade into disruptions across finance, media, and government services. Traffic measurements from that event showed drops of up to 68 percent for some networks and tens of millions of user‑reported problems worldwide.
The Cloudflare incident adds another layer to the picture: even if back‑end servers are fine, issues in the “front door” layer—DNS, CDN, and security edges—can make everything feel broken.
When both cloud computing and network‑edge protection are concentrated in a small number of companies, society inherits “systemic risk,” similar to what we see with large banks.
Policymakers, researchers, and civil‑society groups have been warning for years that we need clearer standards for resilience, redundancy, and transparency in internet infrastructure.
These outages are not just glitches; they are live stress tests of how much centralization we are willing to tolerate.
How can regular users protect themselves?
Practical steps for everyday resilience
We cannot control how Cloudflare or AWS design their networks, but we can reduce our personal reliance on single points of failure.
Keeping local copies of important documents, having more than one communication channel, and not tying every login to a single social media account can all help.
For critical tasks—like banking, medical services, or remote learning—it helps to know at least one alternative platform or offline process in case the main service is down. You can also learn to check whether an outage is local (your Wi‑Fi, your device) or global using tools like status pages or independent monitoring sites.
Anyway, small habits like writing down key phone numbers or keeping a paper copy of vital medical information can make a big difference if apps go dark for a few hours. A few minutes of preparation on a calm day can save a lot of stress when your favourite services suddenly stop loading.
What should website owners and developers do after this?
Avoiding single points of failure in architecture
For site owners, the Cloudflare outage is a clear signal to review architecture diagrams and identify where one provider failure can take out the entire service.
That could mean using multi‑DNS setups, fallback CDNs, or at least defining clear “degraded mode” behaviours when security or caching layers are unavailable.
Even when it is not realistic to pay for full multi‑cloud or multi‑CDN redundancy, developers can still design services that fail more gracefully. For example, static content can often still be served from backups, and login systems can include temporary offline tokens or cached credentials for limited periods.
From a monitoring perspective, it is helpful to track upstream providers separately so teams can quickly see whether a spike in errors is internal or linked to an external outage. Clear status communication with users—simple dashboards, honest messages, realistic timelines—can reduce frustration and protect trust even when the root problem lies outside your own servers.
FAQ: the questions people Googled during the Cloudflare outage
“Is Cloudflare down right now, or is it just me?”
When thousands of people search this at the same time, monitoring platforms show it almost instantly. If your connection is fine and multiple unrelated services fail together, it is often a strong hint that a shared provider such as Cloudflare is having issues.
“Why are X, Spotify, and ChatGPT all down together?”
These services rely—directly or indirectly—on Cloudflare for DNS, security, or content delivery, so a serious problem at Cloudflare can hit all of them in one blow. From the outside it feels mysterious, but under the hood they share common plumbing.
“How many websites use Cloudflare?”
Recent data suggests that around 20 percent of all websites, representing over 39 million domains, use Cloudflare.
That makes it one of the most widely adopted infrastructure providers on Earth.
“How long did the November 18 outage last?”
From first acknowledgment around 12:17 to the fix announced at 15:42 Italian time, we can say roughly three and a half hours of major disruption. Some dashboards and control tools remained unstable for a short while after that window.
“Was this the biggest Cloudflare outage ever?”
It was certainly one of the most visible, since it touched so many popular apps at once and came shortly after other infrastructure incidents. Whether it was the absolute “biggest” depends on how you measure impact—number of users, duration, or volume of traffic affected—and that comparison is still being studied.
Conclusion
So, what did this Cloudflare incident really show us? On the surface it was a frustrating afternoon of spinning loaders and broken apps, but underneath it was a rare, clear look at how interconnected and concentrated our internet has become.
We learned that a single company handling about a fifth of the web can, for a few hours, make that web feel strangely small and fragile.
We also saw that honest communication, rapid mitigation, and ongoing transparency are not technical extras; they are part of the social contract of running critical infrastructure.
This article was crafted for you by FreeAstroScience.com, a site dedicated to making complex science and technology understandable without dumbing it down. Oh, and before you close this tab, keep your mind awake and questioning, because—as Goya warned—the sleep of reason breeds monsters, including digital ones.
If this outage left you curious, or even a little uneasy, take that feeling as an invitation to stay informed and ask harder questions about how our networks are built.
You are always welcome back at FreeAstroScience.com, where we will keep following the science and the systems that shape your everyday online life.
References
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- Cloudflare down: OpenAI, Twitter, Spotify, Canva, Claude…, Times of India Tech, November 2025. [web:6]
- Cloudflare: Security, DDoS protection, CDN, DNS and Speed, Getspace Support, 2021.
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- The AWS Outage That Shook The Internet: What It Means…, Forbes, 20 October 2025. [web:14]
- Cloudflare outage takes down X, ChatGPT and other websites, BBC News, 18 November 2025. [web:15]
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