Cloudflare announces services restored after internet outage
By The Guardian, November 18, 2025A global outage at Cloudflare, a US-based internet infrastructure company, caused error messages to appear across major websites on Tuesday, affecting platforms such as X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Canva, and retail sites including Visa, Vodafone, Asda, and M&S.
The issues began in the early hours of the US morning and during UK business hours, with thousands of users reporting problems to outage monitoring site Downdetector.
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On X’s homepage, a message noted a server error originating from Cloudflare, while ChatGPT users were prompted to “unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed.”
Cloudflare said at 11:48 GMT that it was investigating the incident and working on a fix. Nearly three hours later, the company announced the outage was resolved.
A firm spokesperson said a fix had been implemented and that services were being monitored to ensure full restoration. Several key sites were tested and reported to be loading again.
The outage also prompted Cloudflare to temporarily disable some services for UK users while remediation efforts were ongoing.
Scheduled maintenance at data centres in Tahiti, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Santiago was reported for the same day, though it is unclear if this contributed to the outage.
Prof Alan Woodward of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security described Cloudflare as a “gatekeeper” of the internet, performing functions such as verifying human users and defending sites against distributed denial-of-service attacks. He said the outage was unlikely to have been caused by a cyber-attack.
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Cloudflare handles around 20% of web traffic globally. The company noted a spike in unusual traffic beginning at 11:20 GMT, which caused errors across multiple services. While most traffic continued normally, elevated errors were observed. Cloudflare continues to monitor systems and implement fixes to prevent further disruptions.
This incident comes less than a month after Amazon Web Services suffered an outage affecting thousands of websites, highlighting the dependency of the modern internet on a small number of major infrastructure providers.