A significant disruption originating from Cloudflare’s global network infrastructure triggered a widespread internet outage on Tuesday, November 18, 2025, severely impacting millions of users across a multitude of digital platforms. The incident, characterized by a cascade of system failures, rendered core services inaccessible for an extended period, highlighting the internet’s critical dependency on centralized content delivery networks.
The outage manifested for end-users as an inability to load content, engage with posts, or log into accounts, with platforms displaying persistent ‘500 Internal Server Error’ messages. Cloudflare’s official status page confirmed the severity of the incident, reporting a major global network issue that precipitated widespread ‘500 errors’ and concurrent failures in its administrative dashboard and API endpoints. Engineering teams were immediately mobilized to diagnose the root cause and implement mitigation protocols.
The scope of the disruption extended far beyond a single service, creating a domino effect that incapacitated a diverse portfolio of high-traffic websites and applications. Notably affected were the social media platform X, the AI-powered chatbot service ChatGPT, and the design tool Canva. The outage also impinged on the digital entertainment sector, hindering access to popular gaming services such as League of Legends, and caused significant downtime for various cryptocurrency exchange front-ends. In a notable irony, Downdetector, a leading service for tracking online outages which itself relies on Cloudflare, was also rendered partially unavailable, complicating real-time reporting of the event’s scale.
This incident serves as a stark reminder of the interconnected nature of the modern web and the systemic risks associated with concentrated infrastructure, prompting renewed discussions on digital resilience and redundancy.