The most recent Cloudflare outage occurred on November 18, 2025, causing widespread disruptions across the internet and affecting thousands of websites and services worldwide.
What Happened Link to heading
On November 18, 2025, at approximately 11:20 UTC, Cloudflare began experiencing a major service outage that quickly escalated to global impact. Users and websites dependent on Cloudflare saw error messages—primarily HTTP 5xx errors—making services like X, ChatGPT, Uber, Canva, and many more unavailable for several hours. Early diagnostics mistakenly suggested a potential DDoS attack, especially since the company’s public status page also became unreachable, adding to the confusion.thousandeyes
Root Cause Link to heading
Cloudflare identified the root cause as a bug in a configuration file related to its Bot Management feature. A routine update doubled the size of this configuration file, exceeding a built-in software limit, which led to cascading failures throughout core services. This triggered widespread interruptions in core CDN functions, authentication services like Cloudflare Access and Turnstile, and the internal dashboard for system administrators and users. Notably, there was no evidence of any cyberattack or malicious activity; the disruption was entirely due to an internal software error triggered by the configuration change.linkedin
Timeline and Resolution Link to heading
At 11:20 UTC, unusual traffic was detected, and major services began failing.[cloudflare]](https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/)
Multiple mitigation steps were initiated, including stopping the propagation of the faulty configuration and rolling back to an earlier version.dannydehard
By 14:30 UTC, most core traffic was flowing as normal, with restoration of remaining services completed by 17:06 UTC.bluehoste
Cloudflare committed to strengthening internal processes, including more robust configuration checks and faster kill-switch deployment for future incidents.dannydenhard
Broader Impact Link to heading
This outage highlighted the Internet’s reliance on cloud and CDN providers like Cloudflare, as the event caused substantial disruptions not just for consumers but for a variety of critical platforms and SaaS applications. For many, it served as a reminder of the importance of redundancy and disaster planning in modern web infrastructure.deployflow
Key Lessons Link to heading
Rigid configuration limits and rapid propagation systems can become single points of failure.radware
Broad internet platforms need to bolster failover options and adopt multi-vendor resiliency planning to prevent complete outages when one core provider experiences problems.deployflow
Transparent, detailed communication from Cloudflare—including a thorough postmortem blog post—was widely praised for helping customers and observers understand and recover from the incident.dannydenhard
This recent outage demonstrates both the complexity of securing global internet infrastructure and the ongoing need for vigilant engineering, monitoring, and transparent communications when problems arise.cloudflare