Unprecedented Traffic Spike Triggers Worldwide Internet Crisis
A massive Cloudflare outage on Tuesday, November 18, 2025, disrupted internet services globally, rendering major platforms including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Facebook, and thousands of other websites temporarily inaccessible. The incident highlighted the internet’s vulnerability to centralized infrastructure failures, as a single company’s technical problems cascaded across the digital ecosystem.
Cloudflare acknowledged the issue, citing widespread ‘500’ errors and failures across its dashboard and API, leaving users worldwide staring at error messages instead of their favorite websites. The company’s shares fell 3.5% in pre-market trading following the disruption, which began around 11:48 UTC (4:48 PM Pakistan time).
Pakistan Severely Affected by Global Disruption
The impact in Pakistan was particularly severe, with major domestic news portals, including Geo, Samaa, Dawn, and ARY, rendered inaccessible to many users. User reports from Pakistan indicated problems with Cloudflare beginning around 4:10 PM, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority responded promptly, stating it was closely monitoring the global outage and maintaining contact with global platforms and local operators. The authority assured citizens it would continue to observe the situation until services were fully restored, emphasizing that the disruption was a global technical issue rather than any local internet filtering or blocking.
Unusual Traffic Spike Behind the Crisis
A Cloudflare spokesperson said the company observed a “spike in unusual traffic” to one of its services around 6:20 a.m. ET before the errors began. The company admitted it did not yet know the cause of this unusual traffic spike but mobilized all available resources to restore service immediately.
The timing of the outage raised questions, as Cloudflare had scheduled maintenance in its Santiago datacenter for the same day. While the company did not directly link the maintenance to the outage, the coincidence prompted speculation about whether routine updates might have triggered unintended consequences across the global network.
Major Platforms Knocked Offline
Social media platform X experienced one of the most visible impacts, with Downdetector reporting a whopping 12,371 user complaints at peak, though reports began dropping as services started recovering. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Sora video generation service also confirmed they were experiencing issues due to problems with a third-party service provider—clearly referencing Cloudflare.
Even Downdetector itself, the go-to website for checking service outages, became a victim of the crisis. The irony was not lost on frustrated users who attempted to verify whether problems were isolated or widespread, only to find that the outage tracking service relied on Cloudflare for its own protection and was therefore unavailable.
Understanding the Technical Impact
The outage manifested primarily as HTTP 500 internal server errors—generic messages indicating that websites were down but unable to specify the exact problem. A DNS server is an address book that matches a website’s name to its real IP address, and when the provider experiences an outage, websites using that service become inaccessible as users cannot connect to the site’s server.
Cloudflare’s Turnstile system, which replaced traditional CAPTCHA challenges for bot verification, failed globally. This meant users could not complete security checks needed to access many websites, even those that remained technically operational. The cascading failures demonstrated how deeply embedded Cloudflare’s infrastructure has become in the modern internet ecosystem.
Recovery Efforts and Timeline
Cloudflare moved quickly to address the crisis. By 13:09 UTC, the company announced that the issue had been identified and a fix was being implemented. However, the recovery process involved difficult tradeoffs—at one point, Cloudflare disabled WARP access in London to facilitate broader service restoration, temporarily leaving London users without internet connectivity through the service.
By 13:13 UTC, Cloudflare reported that changes had allowed its Access and WARP services to recover, with error levels returning to pre-incident rates. The company continued working toward restoring other services throughout the afternoon, with most platforms reporting normal operations by early evening.
Pattern of Cloud Infrastructure Failures
This incident represents the latest in a troubling series of cloud infrastructure outages affecting global internet services. The outage comes just weeks after Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage that disrupted services across thousands of websites and applications, including Coinbase’s trading platform and Base layer-2 network.
The AWS disruption in October was traced to a latent bug in an automated DNS management system. Before that, Microsoft’s Azure cloud services experienced significant problems. The pattern has raised serious concerns among cybersecurity experts about the internet’s over-reliance on a small number of centralized infrastructure providers.
Expert Warnings About Centralization Risks
Industry experts seized on the outage to highlight systemic vulnerabilities in internet architecture. Graeme Stewart, head of public sector at cybersecurity firm Check Point, noted that during the outage, news sites, payments, public information pages and community services all froze—not because each organization failed on its own, but because a single layer they all rely on stopped responding.
Monica Eaton, CEO of payment services company Chargebacks911, warned that Cloudflare going dark should snap every merchant back to reality, emphasizing the importance of redundancies and backup plans rather than hoping luck will cover the gaps. Her comments reflected growing recognition that businesses cannot afford to depend entirely on single infrastructure providers, regardless of their reliability track records.
Crypto Sector Hit Particularly Hard
The cryptocurrency industry experienced significant disruptions during the outage. Arbiscan, DefiLlama, and several other crypto-related sites experienced downtime tied to Cloudflare’s system-wide disruption, with Toncoin suffering a “major outage” alongside Arbitrum block explorer Arbiscan. Crypto exchange BitMEX also reported investigating outages linked to Cloudflare problems.
The vulnerability of cryptocurrency platforms to cloud infrastructure failures has sparked renewed debate about the sector’s claims to decentralization. Critics pointed out that despite blockchain technology’s distributed architecture, many crypto services remain dependent on centralized internet infrastructure, creating single points of failure that undermine the industry’s fundamental principles.