AW Dev Rethought Flash: Cloudflare Outage – November 18, 2025

What Happened

On November 18, 2025, a major Cloudflare outage disrupted access to several high-traffic platforms including ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), Spotify, Canva, and many more.

Users across the world suddenly saw “Internal Server Error”, “Origin Unreachable”, and similar error messages, as Cloudflare’s network briefly failed to route traffic normally.

Cloudflare later confirmed that this was an internal system issue — not a cyberattack.

Impact

• Global users were unable to access major websites and apps for nearly 2–3 hours.
• CDN, DNS, and security layers provided by Cloudflare temporarily failed to handle requests.
• High-profile platforms relying on Cloudflare experienced complete or partial downtime.
• Traffic began recovering after Cloudflare deployed a fix across their network.

Outage Cause Explained

Cloudflare shared that the issue was triggered by an unexpectedly large configuration file update used by one of their internal systems.

This oversized update caused certain network processes to crash while loading the file, which in turn affected how requests were routed globally.

In simpler terms:

Cloudflare pushed a configuration change → the file size doubled unexpectedly → systems couldn’t load it → global routing failures occurred.

Why It Matters

Cloudflare sits in the middle of a huge portion of today’s internet — handling caching, DNS, bot filtering, and traffic security. When Cloudflare goes down, even briefly, it causes large ripple effects across dozens of major platforms.

This outage is another reminder that:

• Centralized infrastructure can be a single point of failure.
• Even non-malicious internal changes can lead to global disruption.
• Online services need strong fallback plans and redundancy across providers.

Final Thoughts

Cloudflare resolved the issue within a few hours and confirmed it was a technical fault, not a security incident. Services returned to normal once the corrected configuration was propagated across the network.

Still, the outage shows how dependent apps and businesses are on third-party infrastructure — and why resilience, multi-CDN strategies, and safe deployment practices matter more than ever.