On November 17-18, 2025, a major Cloudflare outage sent shockwaves across the internet, disrupting many of the world’s most popular websites and online services. This blog post provides a detailed timeline of the outage, the cause, the impact on internet users worldwide, and Cloudflare’s resolution efforts.
Timeline of Events
- November 17, 2025 — Early Hours: Reports begin to surface of widespread connectivity issues with services using Cloudflare. Users attempting to access platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Discord, Shopify, SoundCloud, Coinbase, Canva, and Grindr encounter error messages indicating internal server errors or timeouts.
- Mid-Morning: The scope of the outage becomes clear as more sites report downtime or degraded performance. Cloudflare releases a status update confirming an ongoing network disruption affecting DNS and content delivery services.
- Late Morning: Cloudflare identifies a software crash caused by a specific file as the root trigger of the outage. The company confirms no evidence of malicious activity, attributing the incident to an internal error.
- Early Afternoon: Engineers implement a fix to address the software failure and begin a phased rollout to restore network functionality.
- Mid-Afternoon: Most affected services resume normal operation, though some users report lingering issues as Cloudflare continues to monitor system stability and performance.
- November 18, 2025 — Cloudflare officially declares the incident resolved after more than two hours of disruptions and provides a post-incident review indicating the steps taken to prevent future occurrences.
Impact and Analysis
Cloudflare’s outage demonstrated how dependent much of the internet has become on a handful of major infrastructure providers that deliver content and security services globally. When Cloudflare’s network experienced a fault, the effects were far-reaching and immediate, affecting social media platforms, e-commerce sites, financial services, and communication tools.
The incident underscored both the strengths and risks of centralized internet infrastructure providers. While they enable efficient and secure content delivery at global scale, issues within these networks can lead to widespread service interruptions.
Looking Ahead
Cloudflare has committed to conducting a thorough investigation of the root cause and enhancing their internal safeguards to reduce the likelihood of similar outages in the future. For users and businesses, the event is a reminder of the importance of resilience planning, redundancy, and multi-provider strategies in internet-dependent operations.
This outage in November 2025 will be studied as a notable case of a large-scale cloud infrastructure disruption and its ripple effects across the digital ecosystem.
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