Outage at Cloudflare Disrupts Parts of the Internet

What happened?

On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare experienced a widespread service interruption that lasted for several hours. The outage began around 02:15 UTC and affected the company’s global network of data centers, causing a cascade of connectivity problems for the many websites and online services that rely on its platform.

Scope of the impact

Cloudflare’s infrastructure supports millions of domains, ranging from personal blogs to major e‑commerce platforms and news outlets. During the incident, users reported:

• Slow or failed page loads on popular sites that use Cloudflare’s CDN and DNS services.
• Intermittent loss of access to cloud‑based applications hosted behind Cloudflare’s reverse‑proxy.
• Temporary disruptions to security features such as DDoS protection and Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules.

While the outage was not universal, it was significant enough that several high‑traffic sites experienced noticeable downtime, prompting a surge in social‑media chatter and customer support tickets.

Response from Cloudflare

Cloudflare’s engineering team issued an official statement shortly after the incident was detected:

“We are aware of a service disruption affecting a portion of our network. Our teams are actively working to restore full functionality and are conducting a thorough post‑mortem to understand the root cause. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank our customers for their patience.”

The company also posted live updates on its status page, indicating that the majority of services were back online by 09:40 UTC. A detailed technical analysis is expected to be released later this week.

What users can do

For website owners and developers who rely on Cloudflare, the outage highlights the importance of having contingency plans. Experts recommend:

• Implementing secondary DNS providers to mitigate DNS‑related failures.
• Maintaining offline backups of critical content and configurations.
• Monitoring service status pages and setting up automated alerts for early detection of outages.

Most affected sites have reported that normal performance has resumed, but users are encouraged to verify that their own services are functioning correctly and to report any lingering issues to Cloudflare support.