Person’s handing hold an iPhone displaying a Cloudflare Error while attempting to access a webpage, during an outage of the Cloudflare service, Lafayette, California, November 18, 2025.
Smith Collection/gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Cloudflare, a prominent internet infrastructure and cybersecurity firm (NET), experienced a significant service disruption Tuesday, impacting a wide array of websites globally and raising concerns about the fragility of critical internet dependencies.
While most affected sites were restored within hours, the incident underscores the growing reliance on intermediary services like Cloudflare and the potential cascading effects when these platforms falter. As of 9:57 a.m. ET, Cloudflare reported implementing a fix, but cautioned that some users might still encounter issues with their online dashboards. The company stated on its status page, “We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”
The outage affected a diverse range of online platforms, including e-commerce giant Shopify (SHOP), job search engine Indeed, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, Truth Social and social media platform X. Even Downdetector, a service that tracks website outages, experienced accessibility issues for some users. NJ Transit also reported disruptions to its digital services due to the Cloudflare incident.
OpenAI’s status page indicated that ChatGPT and its Sora video app had fully recovered after experiencing issues attributed to a “third-party service provider,” presumably a reference to Cloudflare. This highlights the interconnectedness of the modern internet, where a single point of failure can disrupt seemingly unrelated services.
According to a Cloudflare spokesperson, the root cause was traced to an automatically generated configuration file intended to manage threat traffic. This file “grew beyond an expected size of entries,” triggering a cascade of failures within the software system responsible for handling traffic across several Cloudflare services.
The company detected an “spike in unusual traffic” around 5:20 a.m. ET, preceding the actual outage. Cloudflare maintains there’s no evidence suggesting the disruption was the result of a malicious attack or other nefarious activity.
“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” the spokesperson stated, extending an apology to customers and the internet community at large.
Cloudflare’s role as a crucial intermediary is well-established. Its software safeguards and manages traffic for an estimated 20% of the web. Their services are critical in defending against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which aim to overwhelm websites with traffic, rendering them inaccessible.
The outage comes at a sensitive time, less than a month after Amazon (AMZN) Web Services experienced a day-long disruption and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Azure cloud and 365 services suffered a global outage. These events highlight the increasing concentration of internet infrastructure within a handful of providers and the systemic risks associated with this concentration. In July 2024, a software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered an outage that affected flights and financial services.
Shares of Cloudflare reacted to the news, sliding more than 2%.
Analysts are now scrutinizing Cloudflare’s incident response and the potential for increased redundancy in internet infrastructure to mitigate future disruptions. The incident also raises broader questions about the cybersecurity firm’s long-term stability and the potential impact on customer trust. The outage serves as a stark reminder of the challenges in maintaining the increasingly complex and interdependent digital ecosystem.
