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Tuesday, November 18, 2025
A major component of the internet’s behind-the-scenes infrastructure experienced a failure on Tuesday, resulting in error messages appearing across many websites worldwide.
Cloudflare, a U.S.-based company that provides security, routing, and performance tools for millions of sites, reported a technical fault that prevented users from reaching some of the services hosted behind its network.
The disruption also affected site administrators, some of whom were unable to load their analytics and management dashboards. Outage-tracking service Downdetector noted that platforms such as X formally known as (Twitter), and OpenAI showed a rise in user-reported problems during the same period.
The issue was first logged at 11:48 a.m. in London. By 2:48 p.m., Cloudflare stated: “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.”
A representative for the company apologized “to our customers and to the broader internet community for letting you down today.” The spokesperson added: “We will learn from this incident and make improvements.”
While engineers worked to address the malfunction, Cloudflare temporarily shut down its Warp encryption service for users in London, warning that “Users in London trying to access the internet via Warp will see a failure to connect.”
Cybersecurity expert Prof. Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey described Cloudflare as “the biggest tech company most people have never heard of.” The firm advertises its mission as protecting websites, applications, APIs, and AI systems while also helping them load more quickly.
Woodward compared Cloudflare to a digital gatekeeper: it filters and inspects traffic to shield sites from threats such as distributed denial-of-service attacks, and it performs checks to confirm whether incoming requests are from legitimate users rather than automated bots.
After stabilizing its systems, Cloudflare said the incident was triggered by “a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic.”
The file expanded far beyond its intended size, which caused a key software component responsible for managing traffic across several Cloudflare services to crash. The company emphasized: “To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity. We expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post-incident, but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours.”
The outage occurred only weeks after a widespread failure at Amazon Web Services interrupted thousands of websites and online services.
According to Woodward, these incidents highlight how heavily the internet relies on a small number of large infrastructure providers. “When one of these major companies has a problem, the effects become visible very quickly,” he said.
Although the specifics of Cloudflare’s failure were initially unclear, Woodward noted that an attack was improbable, since an organization operating at Cloudflare’s scale is unlikely to depend on a single point of failure.
