If you've tried logging into social media or want to write a quick review of the movie you've just watched, there's a good chance you've run into an error message. That's because internet cybersecurity and network company Cloudflare has gone down.
Cloudflare clarifies on the Cloudflare system status website that "The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented", though it will be some time until we hear why this happened (assuming we ever will).
Cloudflare goes on to state, "We are continuing to work towards restoring other services", and that access has reportedly been restored in London.
Cloudflare doesn't publicly announce its customers, but the recent outage gives us a good idea of who they could be. Social media site X was taken down as Cloudflare was, and so too was Letterboxd, ChatGPT and Canva (this one also went down during the recent AWS outage). Notably, Down Detector, which is the site I use to know if a site is down, was ironically also taken down.
Perhaps the most surprising outage I noticed was on a McDonald's order screen, as was pointed out over on the Cloudflare subreddit.
Even my local McDonald is broken lol from r/CloudFlare
Just last month, Amazon's server went down for 15 hours. In this case, that appears to be all down to a single software bug, but we don't actually know what caused Cloudflare's issue.
AWS going down took Fortnite, Roblox, and even Reddit with it, and estimates place the damages of that outage at over $75 million per hour.
Cloudflare doesn't appear to have hit games quite as hard, but it has resources for those games, like the Arc Raiders interactive map is not currently available.
X alternative BlueSky is still live, but Deck Blue, effectively a Tweet Deck for BlueSky, is not currently available.
As of 13:35 UTC / 5:35 PT, Cloudflare says it is "continuing working on restoring service for application services customers."
Alas, I attempted to log a movie on Letterboxd and was met with an error screen. With my opinions on movies, that's probably a good thing.
In a statement given to our friends over at TechRadar, Cloudflare has stated:
"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."
Cloudflare has just updated its system status website to reiterate the last message. Naturally, this means the outage has not yet been fixed yet.
"We are continuing working on restoring service for application services customers."
As you might be able to guess from, well, anything happening on the internet, the Cloudflare subreddit has just erupted in memes and jokes at the internet companies' expense.
I thought I'd take a peek to see if there was any more information given on what is happening, and I was met with the following.
First day working at Cloudflare. Gonna do some network updates, hope everything goes well 🙏 from r/CloudFlare
Both ChatGPT and therefore Windows Copilot are having issues right now, with Cloudflare surely the issue at its heart. For its part OpenAI's status page notes that, "We're currently experiencing issues."
Cloudflare's latest update as of 14.34 UTC states that, "We've deployed a change which has restored dashboard services. We are still working to remediate broad application services impact."
But there's a lot of stuff still down...
Ah, we were so close. While some sites are back online, such as ChatGPT and X, with Copilot back online, too, there are still some reports of dashboard issues.
But, Cloudflare suggests that an implemented fix has sorted things out for most people.
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Update - Some customers may be still experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard. We are working on a fix to resolve this, and continuing to monitor for any further issues.
Nov 18, 2025 - 14:57 UTC -
Monitoring - A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.
Nov 18, 2025 - 14:42 UTC
Cloudflare's latest update to the system status website reports it is currently monitoring the situation for further issues, after an earlier update reported on a fix being rolled out. That means we should hope to see Cloudflare services coming back online.
The 'Network' section of this website, which previously said "offline" has now been swapped to "degraded performance", which is a definite upgrade.
Now that things appear to have resolved, Cloudflare has told TechRadar:
"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."
