Another multi-platform outage strikes: popular web traffic security platform Cloudflare suffered issues in the early hours of this morning, triggering downtime across popular websites and social platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), as confirmed by the official Cloudflare Status page. While it isn't quite as devastating as the recent AWS outages, it's still an example of how much of the web is propped up by a handful of well-meaning services.
The root cause hasn't been revealed, though "scheduled maintenance in SCL (Santiago) datacenter" was planned at Cloudflare for the same time of day. However, there's no evidence to suggest that any routine work is linked to the downtime. Some updates from Cloudflare's team were a touch more technical, focusing on its 'WARP' web traffic encryption technology, as it "disabled WARP access in London."
We continue to see errors drop as we work through services globally and clearing remaining errors and latency.
Cloudflare, 11:46 AM ET
Naturally, users in the United States shouldn't have been affected much by changes to servers hosted in London, UK, but the overall red alert status nevertheless continues as Cloudflare continues to "work towards restoring other services". It didn't last long, and 'WARP' was soon re-enabled within a few minutes, but the problems persist: X is inaccessible for many, and errors have recently increased.
With a brutal touch of irony, even downdetector, a popular downtime tracker, was initially taken offline due to its reliance on Cloudflare's services, though it seemed to recover within only a few minutes. For many users, myself included, downdetector is usually the first destination for troubleshooting slow-loading websites, but "Internal server error" messages joined the same generic "error code 500" accompaniment seen across the internet.
Move over AWS, it's Cloudflare's turn
Today's downtime started around 6:00 AM ET, when Cloudflare started "experiencing issues", which led to the degradation of Elon Musk's social platform X, alongside popular online multiplayer video games like League of Legends, with users flocking to report issues on downdetector (as I said, at least when it was functional).
By 7:03 AM ET, Cloudflare confirmed that its teams were "continuing to investigate" the issue, while its status page even showed signs of problems, with the CSS page styling beginning to break down, leaving basic text and misaligned images.
Can't find out if Cloudflare is down because Cloudflare being down has taken out DownDetector, along with half the internet.
— @jim.londoncentric.media (@jim.londoncentric.media.bsky.social) 2025-11-18T17:05:11.589Z
Further communications came at 7:21 AM ET, claiming that Cloudflare was "seeing services recover," but that some of its customers (alongside regular users) could continue seeing error messages. Ditto for about 10 minutes later, and throughout the hours up to around 9 AM ET, as its internal investigations kept rolling, and X still sporadically failed to load.
If you were (or still are) struggling to load posts on X, you'd likely see "Something went wrong. Try reloading" messages. That's if you ever make it past the 500 errors, just as anyone trying to create work on Canva suffers similar blocks. Even if you're trying to play a few games of LoL or Valorant, this is likely why you couldn't connect to any servers.
Generic messages like "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed" appear on several websites, including OpenAI, though access to ChatGPT seemed to recover first, with the corporate website following after.
If you still see this message while browsing the web this morning, don't fret; you haven't actually done anything wrong. Rather, the security systems Cloudflare provides aren't working, though the websites they're supposed to protect remain live in the background.
Our own team is experiencing issues with PayPal and Uber (specifically, Uber Eats), though it doesn't appear to be as widespread as other platforms. The apps and websites themselves load, but payments and orders are intermittently affected. Chalk this up to another learning experience, and always keep your essential data backed up. You never know which services might go offline during these kinds of outage events.
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