@CrazyMusicLover Here’s a breakdown of the outage involving Cloudflare on November 18, 2025:
Around 6:40 a.m ET, Cloudflare detected an “internal service degradation”.
The company reported a “spike in unusual traffic” beginning around 11:20 UTC (≈ 6:20 a.m ET) that triggered elevated error rates across its network.
The outage impacted many high-profile services including ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), and others that rely on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
Cloudflare started deploying fixes and restoring services, but warned that higher–than–normal error rates might persist even as recovery continues.
Why It Matters
Cloudflare handles a very large share of global web traffic (over 20 % of websites as of recent estimates).
Because so many sites and services depend on it, an outage at this level cascades — even if individual services aren’t directly at fault. The failure shows how much of the internet’s “plumbing” relies on a few key nodes.
From a continuity/resilience perspective: even well-architected systems can suffer widespread disruption if an upstream infrastructure provider falters.
What Users Can Do / Checks to Make
If you encounter 500-type errors (server-error pages) or services becoming unreachable, verify whether the issue is local (your ISP / device) or widespread (via outage trackers like Downdetector).
For service providers or administrators: check whether your site’s dependencies include Cloudflare (or similar infrastructure) and consider contingency routing or multi-CDN strategies.
For end users: patience often helps — such outages tend to resolve once the provider implements a fix, though symptoms (slowness, partial failures) may linger for some time.
