Cloudflare down latest: ‘Fix’ update issued after X, ChatGPT and more websites suffer mass outage

Parts of the web appear to have stopped working amid a technical problem at Cloudflare.

Visitors to websites such as X, formerly known as Twitter, ChatGPT and film reviewing site Letterboxd saw an error message that indicated that Cloudflare problems meant that the page could not show.

Cloudflare is an internet infrastructure that offers many of the core technologies that power today’s online experiences. That includes tools that protect websites from cyber attacks and ensure that they stay online amid heavy traffic, for instance.

“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers,” the company said in a new update. “Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”

Tracking website Down Detector, which monitors outage, was also hit by the technical problems itself. But when it loaded it showed a dramatic spike in problems.

Affected users saw a message indicating there was an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network”. It asked users to “please try again in a few minutes”.

Key Points

• Wide array of websites taken offline by Cloudflare outage
• When did the issues begin?
• What is Cloudflare?
• Cloudflare issues 'fix' update

Latest update from Cloudflare as services return to normal

19:15 , Holly Evans

In an updated notification to their system, the network service said: “Cloudflare services are currently operating normally. We are no longer observing elevated errors or latency across the network.

“Our engineering teams continue to closely monitor the platform and perform a deeper investigation into the earlier disruption, but no configuration changes are being made at this time.

“At this point, it is considered safe to re-enable any Cloudflare services that were temporarily disabled during the incident. We will provide a final update once our investigation is complete.”

Cloudflare CTO says services are now 'fully operational'

18:30 , Holly Evans

Dane Knecht, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, has said that their services should now be “fully operational” in his latest update after the internet infrastructure suffered a technical problem.

He said: “Sharing an update on the recovery of our services. We were able to resolve the impact to traffic flowing through our network at approximately 14:30 UTC, which was our first priority, but the incident required some additional work to fully restore our control plane (our dashboard and the APIs our customers use to configure Cloudflare).

“The control plane should now be fully available. We are monitoring those services and continuing to ensure that everything is fully operational. Again, we plan to share a complete walkthrough of what went wrong today in a couple of hours and how we plan to make sure this never happens again.”

Sharing an update on the recovery of our services. We were able to resolve the impact to traffic flowing through our network at approximately 14:30 UTC, which was our first priority, but the incident required some additional work to fully restore our control plane (our dashboard… https://t.co/SQR2KdsrX0

— Dane Knecht 🦭 (@dok2001) November 18, 2025

Cloudflare disruption is small compared to other recent outages

17:54 , Andrew Griffin

Today felt very dramatic. But it’s nowhere near the biggest outage of recent years. Here’s a rundown of some of the worst.

Cloudflare downtime has hit major sites. But it’s not the worst outage

Cloudflare's chief technology officer says outage was 'unacceptable' and apologises

16:53 , Andrew Griffin

Dane Knecht, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, is direct and damning in his words about the outage today. In a long post on X, formerly known as Twitter, he admitted that his company had “failed” its customers.

“I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused,” he wrote.

“Transparency about what happened matters, and we plan to share a breakdown with more details in a few hours. In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack.

“That issue, impact it caused, and time to resolution is unacceptable. Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today. The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most and we are going to do what it takes to earn that back.”

Some 'issues' remain after fix, Cloudflare says

15:54 , Andrew Griffin

The latest update from Cloudflare suggests that there might still be some issues as the company and its customers recover.

“The team is continuing to focus on restoring service post-fix. We are mitigating several issues that remain post-deployment.”

Expert explains why outage was so disruptive

15:53 , Andrew Griffin

This comment from Alan Woodward, Professor of Cybersecurity at the University of Surrey, explains both what Cloudflare is and why today’s outage spread so widely.

“Cloudflare provides a form of internet shield, preventing some forms of attack and unwanted visits from bots, as well as acting as a global distribution network for content for its clients. Those clients include some well known names such as X, Spotify and Zoom. It supports something like 30% of the Fortune 100 companies. The downside of being a gatekeeper and distribution network for such big brands is that if this vital system fails, no one can use your service be that website or app. It’s still not clear exactly what went wrong but it looks like it was a technical malfunction within Cloudflare network. This in itself is surprising as such networks are designed to avoid single points of failure.

“Although Cloudflare say their services are recovering, the high profile clients means it was highly visible and disruptive. Knock-on effects are still being felt as Cloudflare continue to investigate what happened.

“This incident, as with the recent outage at AWS, shows how reliant some very important Internet based services are on a relatively few major players. It’s a double edged sword as these service providers need to be large to provide the scale and global reach required by big brands. But when they fail the impact can be significant. This won’t be the last time one of these big providers fails and the internet suffers disruption.”

Broken websites appear to be fixed

14:56 , Andrew Griffin

Anecdotally, it does seem that Cloudflare’s update (see below) is correct. Websites that had previously been broken such as Twitter and ChatGPT are now back to life.

Cloudflare claims to have fixed the problem

14:47 , Andrew Griffin

The troubles might now be over, at least according to Cloudflare.

“A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved,” an update to its service status page reads. “We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”

Cloudflare claims to have fixed the problem

14:46 , Andrew Griffin

The troubles might now be over, at least according to Cloudflare.

“A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved,” an update to its service status page reads. “We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”

Cloudflare appears to still be struggling for a fix

14:26 , Andrew Griffin

The last two Cloudflare updates had been the same thing: “We are continuing working on restoring service for application services customers”.

Now, a new one, though it says the same thing: “We are continuing to work on a fix for this issue”.

It appears we’re still some way from a fix.

Why you might be getting accused of being a security risk today

14:11 , Andrew Griffin

Are you being asked to unblock Cloudflare? Or even being told that you might be a security risk.

You’re not alone. Here’s why those error messages are coming up – and what you can do (which is basically nothing but wait).

What the weird error appearing on ChatGPT right now means

When will Cloudflare be back up?

13:54 , Andrew Griffin

The issues – which have affected everything from ChatGPT to X, and even tracking website Down Detector – have now been going on for more than two hours.

And there is no sign that they’ll be fixed soon. Cloudflare hasn’t given any indication of how long it thinks it will take. (And previously it suggested they had been fixed when it hadn’t, which suggests it is a big and perhaps hard to grasp issue.)

But it has committed that it is “continuing working on restoring service”, as part of a run of updates that are generally reassuring but give no specific information.

Problems appear to be spreading

13:46 , Andrew Griffin

According to tracking website Down Detector, whole new websites are being dragged into the outage. Products as various as shopping platform Vinted and gay dating app Grindr are now showing up as having problems, all of a sudden.

(It’s worth noting however that Down Detector itself has been hit by the problems, so its tracking might not be as dependable as usual.)

Work is 'continuing'

13:43 , Andrew Griffin

“We are continuing working on restoring service for application services customers,” the latest update from Cloudflare reads. (That’s the important bit, which when fixed should let the affected websites get back online.)

Cloudflare says some of its tools are recovering

13:17 , Andrew Griffin

The company’s status page says that it has fixed its Access and WARP tools.

But those are both fairly technical services, and so the problems at big sites might continue.

Cloudflare says that it is “continuing to work towards restoring other services”.

Bet365 knocked offline

12:50 , Andrew Griffin

Betting site bet365 has also been taken down by the Cloudflare outage.

On there, the error message reads: “Sorry, you have been blocked. You are unable to access bet365.com.” It is accompanied by a host of worrying messages about you potentially being a security threat.

But, just like ChatGPT below, you don’t need to worry. The concerning messages are because when Cloudflare is working then to get blocked by it is bad. But Cloudflare isn’t working, as we all know.

ChatGPT also offline

12:47 , Andrew Griffin

ChatGPT is down again.

That page shows an error that is recurring across affected sites: “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”

(But don’t worry – you don’t need to unblock anything, just wait it out.)

Problem does not appear to be solved

12:44 , Andrew Griffin

Anecdotally, the problems seem to be back again. Many pages have stopped loading once more.

Cloudflare says on its status page that it is “continuing to investigate this issue”. That’s a new update, posted since it said it thought it was fixed, suggesting that the problems do remain.

Things appear to be coming back to normal

12:35 , Andrew Griffin

Cloudflare has posted another update, indicating that things are fixing but might still be broken for a little while.

“We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts,” the latest post reads.

Down Detector shows problems at OpenAI and League of Legends

12:32 , Andrew Griffin

X, formerly Twitter, is the most prominent website to stop working as a result of today’s problems. But tracking website Down Detector shows issues at a range of other sites, which might be related.

OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT; bet365; League of Legends and payment company Sage are all showing up as suffering issues.

(Down Detector)

(I don’t think there are problems at Amazon Web Services; I presume the fact that people are discussing and thinking about the outage a month ago is triggering the tool’s automated tracking systems.)

What actually is Cloudflare?

12:27 , Andrew Griffin

It’s usually invisible – and that’s how it should be. But today, Cloudflare got a lot more conspicuous.

Here’s an explainer of what it actually is.

What is Cloudflare? The invisible service behind today’s mass internet issues

Some websites appear to be coming back to life

12:19 , Andrew Griffin

X, formerly Twitter, had previously been inaccessible for this reporter. Now it is loading, so perhaps Cloudflare’s work to mitigate the outage is working.

The company is yet to post on its status page that the problem has been fixed, however.

Cloudflare updates its status amid widespread problems

12:11 , Andrew Griffin

Cloudflare had initially said only that it was aware of troubles. It has now given a little more information – though it still sounds like it does not know the source of the problem or a way to fix it.

“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing,” the updated message reads. “We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly.”

Cloudflare outage echoes AWS problems a month ago

12:09 , Andrew Griffin

Cloudflare provides its internet infrastructure services to companies across the world, usually doing so in a way that is invisible to users. As such, a wide array of apparently unconnected websites were taken down in the outage, just as with a similar technical issue at Amazon Web Services or AWS last month.

How did problems start?

12:08 , Andrew Griffin

The problems began around 11.30am UK time, though at that time some websites appeared to be loading when they were refreshed. Cloudflare posted an update acknowledging the issue around 15 minutes later.

Another 15 minutes later, the company posted an update saying that it was “continuing to investigate this issue” but giving no indication that it was aware of the cause of a problem or a way to fix it.

Hello and welcome...

12:08 , Andrew Griffin

... to The Independent’s live coverage of a major outage at Cloudflare, which provides internet infrastructure for much of the web.