Large parts of the internet suffered major problems today (November 18) following an issue at Cloudflare.
The internet infrastructure service provider took several hours to investigate and fix a widespread issue which affected some big names - including Twitter/X and ChatGPT/OpenAI.
The problems seem fixed for now - but here's what happened over an eventful few hours...
First off - the issue appears to have hit a number of major websites, including X, formerly known as Twitter, film reviewing site Letterboxd - and even outage tracker website DownDetector, which is making tracking the issue quite tricky for us...
Cloudflare has confirmed the problem, posting at 11.48am GMT;
"Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing.
"We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly."
If you're not familiar with the company, Cloudflare provides a wide range of online infrastructure backing up some of the world's biggest websites.
The company's offerings inlcude protection services against cyberattacks, particularly DDoS attacks, where victims are bombarded with huge numbers of requests.
Interestingly, Cloudflare had earlier posted that it was planning "scheduled maintenance" on some of its servers - could this have caused the issue?
"We will be performing scheduled maintenance in SCL (Santiago) datacenter on 2025-11-18 between 12:00 and 15:00 UTC," the company said on its status page.
"Traffic might be re-routed from this location, hence there is a possibility of a slight increase in latency during this maintenance window for end-users in the affected region. For PNI / CNI customers connecting with us in this location, please make sure you are expecting this traffic to fail over elsewhere during this maintenance window as network interfaces in this datacentre may become temporarily unavailable."
We're already seeing some drop-offs in outage reports - could this be over before it's really begun?
There's been no official confirmation or update from Cloudflare, but we'll stay tuned for now...
Interestingly, it seems like in the UK (where I'm typing this from), things are easing up - but in the US, DownDetector is showing another small spike in outage reports...
And in a major ironic moment - the Cloudflare status page itself is down...
"We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error."
Ah - it's back...but still no major news.
"We are continuing to investigate this issue," a 12.21 UTC update reads.
A positive update - Cloudflare says things may be back on the mend...
"We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts," the latest update on its status page says.
It seems the issue is affecting Cloudflare internally too - especially when it comes to customer support.
"Our support portal provider is currently experiencing issues, and as such customers might encounter errors viewing or responding to support cases," the company says. "Responses on customer inquiries are not affected, and customers can still reach us via live chat (Business and Enterprise) through the Cloudflare Dashboard, or via the emergency telephone line (Enterprise)."
"We are working alongside our 3rd party provider to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem."
In "better" news - it seems that Twitter/X is back to full operational capacity.
This was one of the first sites to be apparently affected by the issues at Cloudflare - you can follow TechRadar's live coverage here.
Outage reports continue to drop, but there's still no official end from Cloudflare - in fact, its latest update says the opposite.
"We are continuing to investigate this issue," it posted at 12.37 UTC.
If you think this isn't a major problem - you're wrong, it's having real human effects.
I've just tried to book some holiday time off next month on our internal HR system here at Future - but the website isn't working due to this Cloudflare outage.
No Christmas break for me, I guess....
This must be a tough one though - for the fourth update in a row, Cloudflare's message is the same;
"We are continuing to investigate this issue."
I guess it's good they are keeping us posted?
We're seeing another spike in outage reports on DownDetector - but this is to be expected, as most of the east coast of the US is waking up and logging on for work right now.
Will this extra pressure on servers and services exacerbate the problem? Only time will tell...
Bad news if (like me) you're in London - Cloudflare is going hard on users here in the capital in an attempt to solve things.
"During our attempts to remediate, we have disabled WARP access in London. Users in London trying to access the Internet via WARP will see a failure to connect."
But good news! The issue has been identified, and a fix is on the way...
"The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented," Cloudflare says on its update page.
Londoners can also breathe easy too - "We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates."
There's still no official confirmation from Cloudflare that things are fixed, but outage reports are still plunging, so hopefully that's a good sign?
An interesting side-note - it now looks like ChatGPT may now also be affected by the Cloudflare outage.
The chatbot's site is currently displaying the error message telling users: "please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed," that we've seen elsewhere - so maybe things aren't dying down just yet.
While that goes on, Cloudflare says it is still hard at work fixing the problems, posting, "We are continuing working on restoring service for application services customers."
We've also had an official statement from Cloudflare, to go along with the updates being posted on the company's status page.
"We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare's services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare's network to experience errors. We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic. We will post updates to cloudflarestatus.com and more in-depth analysis when it is ready to blog.cloudflare.com."
I think it's fair to say the US is now online...that's quite a spike!
As mentioned, the biggest names affected by this outage appear to be Twitter and ChatGPT, both of which are reporting issues, most likely due to Cloudflare's problems.
We're covering both of these outages seperately - you can follow updates on the Twitter/X outage here, and the ChatGPT/OpenAI issues here.
Some thoughts from James Capell, our web hosting subject matter expert at TechRadar Pro...
"Cloudflare provides a lot of background services to websites that are essential in making them operate securely and smoothly.
Cloudflare's most popular service is its CDN network, which is the biggest on the market and used by pretty much everyone, including the best web hosting providers, because of that. Cloudflare also provides security features like CAPATCHA and other verification methods.
Obviously something has happened at Cloudflare, and we're not sure what, but it has caused websites that reply on Cloudflare to become inaccessible.
The recent global outages on the internet highlight how much of the web is dependent on only a handful of companies."
Back to your regular updates though, with the latest from Cloudflare...and another possible fix could be on the way.
"We've deployed a change which has restored dashboard services," it has said. "We are still working to remediate broad application services impact"
And just like that - we may have a solution!
"A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved," Cloudflare's latest update says.
"We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal."
Now we wait...it'll take some time for the fix to roll out, but we're already seeing a slight drop in DownDetector outage reports, so fingers crossed this may be the beignning of the end.
Outage reports are still continuing to fall on DownDetector, but we'll keep monitoring the situation a little longer just in case...especially as the west coast of the US will soon be waking up and logging on to, which may set things off again!
If you are still encountering issues with some services, don't worry - Cloudflare is on it.
"Some customers may be still experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard," the company has posted.
"We are working on a fix to resolve this, and continuing to monitor for any further issues.
Cloudflare has now relegated the issue down its status page, below plans for scheduled maintenance, so hopefully this does mean everything is now in hand.
What a rollercoaster of a day!
And to wrap up - an extended comment from Cloudflare...
"Many of Cloudflare's services experienced a significant outage today beginning around 11:20 UTC. It was fully resolved at 14:30 UTC. The root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare's services."
"To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity. We expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post incident but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours. A detailed explanation will be posted soon on blog.cloudflare.com. Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. We will learn from today's incident and improve."
