Internet slowly recovers after far-reaching Cloudflare outage
A currently undisclosed issue has crippled Cloudflare’s network and has rendered a large swathe of internet’s most popular sites and services temporily inaccessible today.
Some of the sites and services affected by the Cloudflare outage (Source: Down Detector)
What happened?
Cloudflare is a crucial internet infrastructure provider: it’s a content delivery and protection network that helps websites load quickly and stay protected from malicious traffic.
(Too?) many sites route their traffic through Cloudflare, so when Cloudflare has an issue, large parts of the internet can be affected at once.
Earlier today, users around the world that were trying to access many popular websites and apps reported seeing server errors and occasionally messages such as “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”
Cloudflare confirmed that the incident affected its Sites and Services (Access, Bot Management, CDN/Cache, Dashboard, Firewall, Network, WARP, Workers).
Down Detector, a website that tracks when popular online services are experiencing outages or problems based on real-time user reports, shows that X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI (and ChatGPT), AWS, Spotify, League of Legends, Grindr, Visa, and many other sites/services were affected and were (or still are) intermittently inaccessible.
Down Detector was inaccessible as well, for a short time.
Cloudflare’s system status page says that trouble began a little before mid-day (UTC) and that the company has identified the issue and implemented a fix.
“We believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” the company stated on 2:42 PM UTC, and noted that it’s working on remediating the impact on application services and has restored dashboard services.
“Some customers may be still experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard. We are working on a fix to resolve this, and continuing to monitor for any further issues,” Cloudflare added.
The nature of the issue that caused this outage is yet to be revealed.
UPDATE (November 19, 2025, 05:10 a.m. ET):
“Cloudflare’s worst outage since 2019” – as Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince described it – was not caused by a cyber attack.
“Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems’ permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a ‘feature file’ used by our Bot Management system,” he explained.
This file doubled in size and was propagated to all the machines that make up Cloudflare’s network.
“The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our Bot Management system up to date with ever changing threats. The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled size. That caused the software to fail.”
In the end, the outage affected Cloudflare’s:
- Core CDN and security services
- The ubiquitous Cloudflare turnstile (which failed to load) and, consequently, prevented users from accessing the Dashboard
- The Workers KV data store
- Cloudflare Access (a Zero Trust Network Access service)
- Email Security service (i.e., its spam-detection accuracy)
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