Global Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Millions of Websites

On Tuesday, 18 November 2025, Cloudflare – a U.S. firm that routes traffic for millions of sites – experienced a worldwide service disruption. The incident was first reported at 11:48 a.m. London time and produced error messages across a broad range of websites, including X and OpenAI. By 2:48 p.m., Cloudflare announced that a fix had been applied and the outage was “now resolved,” though it warned of brief residual degradation as traffic rebounded.

The Guardian

Cloudflare’s platform provides protection against distributed-denial-of-service attacks, traffic monitoring, and human-verification services. The outage follows an Amazon Web Services failure less than a month earlier that knocked thousands of sites offline, underscoring the concentration of critical internet infrastructure in a handful of providers.

The Guardian

A company spokesperson apologized to customers “and the internet in general for letting you down today,” and pledged to “learn from today’s incident and improve.” The firm explained that an automatically generated configuration file had grown beyond its expected size, causing a crash in the traffic-management system. As part of the remediation, Cloudflare temporarily disabled its Warp encryption service in London, warning that users attempting to connect via Warp would encounter failures. The company said it would continue monitoring for errors and expected full service restoration within hours.

The Guardian

Prof. Alan Woodward of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security described Cloudflare as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of” and labeled it a “gatekeeper” for web traffic. He warned that the incident illustrates how few firms dominate the internet’s backbone, noting, “We’re seeing how few of these companies there are in the infrastructure of the internet, so that when one of them fails it becomes really obvious quickly.”

The Guardian

• “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.” — Cloudflare spokesperson

The Guardian

• “We will learn from today’s incident and improve.” — Cloudflare spokesperson

The Guardian

• “Users in London trying to access the internet via Warp will see a failure to connect.” — Cloudflare statement

The Guardian

• “the biggest company you’ve never heard of” — Prof. Alan Woodward, Surrey Centre for Cyber Security

The Guardian

• “We’re seeing how few of these companies there are in the infrastructure of the internet, so that when one of them fails it becomes really obvious quickly,” — Prof. Alan Woodward

The Guardian

This episode highlights the systemic risk posed by reliance on a limited set of internet-level service providers.

The Guardian