A significant outage at Cloudflare, a major internet infrastructure provider, caused widespread disruptions across the web on Tuesday, November 18, 2025, rendering numerous popular websites and online services inaccessible for several hours. The incident, which was not the result of a cyberattack, has once again highlighted the fragility of the internet’s backbone and the critical role of a few key companies in its operation.
The outage began at approximately 11:20 UTC and was characterized by widespread “500 errors,” indicating a server-side problem. Users attempting to access a variety of services were met with error pages, leading to a flood of reports on social media and outage tracking websites. The issue was so widespread that even Downdetector, a popular service for monitoring website status, was temporarily unavailable.
A Technical Glitch with Major Consequences
In a detailed post-mortem, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince explained that the outage was triggered by a seemingly minor technical issue that cascaded into a major failure. A change in permissions for one of the company’s database systems caused a “feature file” used by its Bot Management system to double in size. This oversized file was then propagated across Cloudflare’s global network, causing the software responsible for routing traffic to fail.
The situation was further complicated by the fact that the problematic file was generated every five minutes, leading to a fluctuating state where services would intermittently recover and then fail again. This initially led Cloudflare’s team to suspect a large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, a theory that was later ruled out.
Widespread Impact
The outage had a significant impact on a wide range of online services, demonstrating Cloudflare’s extensive reach in the internet ecosystem. The company is estimated to handle traffic for about 20% of the web. The following table lists some of the major services that were affected by the outage:
| Category | Affected Services |
| Social Media | X (formerly Twitter), Truth Social |
| AI Platforms | ChatGPT, OpenAI, Anthropic’s Claude |
| E-commerce | Shopify |
| Gaming | League of Legends, Valorant |
| Other Services | Spotify, Canva, Grindr, Coinbase, Indeed, NJ Transit |
Resolution and Response
Cloudflare’s engineers were able to identify the root cause of the issue and began implementing a fix. By 14:30 UTC, core traffic was largely flowing as normal, and by 17:06 UTC, all systems were reported to be functioning properly. The fix involved stopping the propagation of the oversized feature file and manually replacing it with a known good version.
In his post-mortem, Prince expressed his apologies for the disruption, stating, “Given Cloudflare’s importance in the Internet ecosystem any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable. That there was a period of time where our network was not able to route traffic is deeply painful to every member of our team. We know we let you down today.”
This incident is the latest in a series of major internet outages that have occurred in recent months, following disruptions at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. These events have raised concerns about the concentration of critical internet infrastructure in the hands of a few large companies and the potential for single points of failure to have a global impact.
Building Resilience Against Infrastructure Outages
The Cloudflare incident underscores the critical importance of business continuity planning and infrastructure resilience. When a major provider experiences downtime, businesses that rely solely on a single infrastructure provider can face significant operational disruptions, lost revenue, and damaged customer relationships.
247 Labs specialize in helping organizations build robust, resilient IT infrastructure that can withstand such outages. Through their DevOps support services and managed IT solutions, businesses can implement strategies to minimize the impact of third-party infrastructure failures.
Key approaches to building resilience include implementing multi-cloud strategies that distribute workloads across multiple providers, establishing comprehensive disaster recovery plans with automated failover capabilities, and deploying 24/7 monitoring and incident response systems that can detect and respond to outages in real-time. Infrastructure as Code practices enable rapid redeployment of services to alternative providers, while hybrid cloud solutions provide flexibility to shift critical workloads when needed.
247 Labs offers cloud-based, end-to-end IT infrastructure solutions that help businesses optimize their operations while ensuring mission-critical support during disruptions. Their team provides around-the-clock monitoring, proactive incident response, and tailored disaster recovery solutions designed to keep businesses operational even when major infrastructure providers experience outages. For organizations looking to strengthen their infrastructure resilience, 247 Labs can be reached at 1-877-247-7421 or hello@247labs.com.
