Cloudflare suffered a major disruption on Tuesday, causing outages across X, ChatGPT and many other platforms.
The incident triggered global access problems as engineers worked to restore normal traffic flow.
A major internet disruption linked to Cloudflare on Tuesday, November 18, caused widespread outages across several top platforms, including X, ChatGPT, and many other online services. The problem began shortly after 11:30 GMT when users around the world started reporting difficulties accessing websites, with outage tracker Downdetector receiving thousands of alerts within minutes.
Cloudflare later confirmed that it detected “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC.” According to the company, the sudden traffic surge led to widespread error messages for websites and applications that rely on its systems. Cloudflare added that technical teams were fully engaged in restoring stability and ensuring that “all traffic is served without errors,” although the exact source of the unusual activity had not been identified.
As engineers worked to contain the problem, Cloudflare said it had rolled out a fix that restored access to its dashboard and reduced the volume of errors. However, it cautioned that some users could still notice brief service interruptions while recovery continued.
During the outage, many X users were met with a message pointing to an internal server problem caused by an issue with Cloudflare. ChatGPT users also reported an alert telling them to “unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed.” Even Downdetector, the website responsible for tracking outages, briefly showed connection issues as people attempted to check the status of affected services.
Cloudflare stated that the disruption affected numerous customers across different sectors. Later updates showed that recovery was ongoing, though some organizations might continue seeing elevated error rates.
The incident drew attention to how heavily the global internet depends on Cloudflare, which provides security, traffic filtering, and protection against DDoS attacks. The company says that about one out of every five websites uses its services. This made the impact of Tuesday’s outage particularly wide.
Alp Toker, director of internet monitoring group NetBlocks, described the event as “a catastrophic disruption to Cloudflare’s infrastructure,” noting how deeply many online platforms rely on the company’s protection tools. Cybersecurity analyst Jake Moore of ESET said the outage revealed the risks of depending on a small number of large infrastructure providers. According to him, recent outages involving Cloudflare, Microsoft, and Amazon show “the reliance on these fragile networks,” as many companies feel they have limited alternatives.
The latest incident comes only weeks after Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure suffered their own service disruptions, which also took hundreds of websites offline temporarily.
