A major Cloudflare outage Tuesday caused widespread disruptions across the internet, affecting websites, apps, and online tools around the globe. The outage began around 5:48 a.m. CST. According to outage-tracking site Downdetector, reports peaked at 8:11 a.m. CST with nearly 11,000 users reporting issues.
Cloudflare helps make the internet faster, safer, and more private by protecting users from hackers and improving website load times. Among the sites affected were X (formerly Twitter), Spotify, OpenAI, Uber, Quizlet, Canva, ChatGPT, Zoom, and many others. Services like Cloudflare Access and WARP gradually returned to normal after targeted fixes, while some users continued to experience dashboard login issues that were later resolved.
By 8:42 a.m. CST, Cloudflare said the main disruption appeared resolved. The company also noted problems with its support portal, while live chat and emergency phone support remained available.
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…
— Dane Knecht 🦭 (@dok2001) November 18, 2025
Cloudflare Chief Technical Officer Dane Knecht said on X that the outage was not an attack. He explained that “a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change, which cascaded into a broad degradation of our network and other services.” He added that the company plans to provide a detailed breakdown of the incident.
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