Cloudflare issues bring down parts of the internet: as it happened
Major websites such as X and ChatGPT temporarily stopped working due to an outage at Internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare on Tuesday. A popular tool for checking whether a site is down, downdetector.com, has also been affected.
In a message on its status page just before noon UTC, the company said that it “is experiencing an internal service degradation,” and investigating the issue.
Cloudflare’s servers act as “reverse proxy,” routing internet traffic through its network to protect against potential cyberthreats to its customers. It protects nearly a fifth of all sites around the world.
Major websites that use its protection have faced intermittent outages.
Last month, a major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused widespread disruptions to online services. A single outage can affect millions of users.
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18 November 2025
15:21 GMTCloudflare stock prices have fallen around 3% since the markets opened on Tuesday, on the back of the outage.
Cloudflare outage this morning impacting X and other websites$NET is currently down about 3.1% pic.twitter.com/QmAhZH7YsY
— Stocktwits (@Stocktwits) November 18, 2025- 14:55 GMT
Cloudflare has reported that it believes the problem has been fixed.
“A fix has been implemented, and we believe the incident is now resolved. We will continue to monitor for any errors to ensure all services are operating normally,” the company said on its status page.
- 14:49 GMT
Service to major websites such as X and Spotify appears to have returned.
- 14:45 GMT
Cloudflare has blamed the outage on a surge in “unusual traffic.”
“We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors,” CBS news cited a company spokesperson as saying.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic.”
- 14:35 GMT
Cloudflare has not yet given an estimate as to how long a solution would take. While the company reported that it found and was implementing a fix at around 13:00 GMT, its latest statement more than an hour later said it was “continuing to work” on the issue.
- 14:26 GMT
The website belonging to Moody’s, one of the biggest financial ratings agencies, has similarly been affected.
- 14:18 GMT
Open AI's ChatGPT, the world's most popular chatbot website, and Downdetector, the go-to platform for checking website status information, have also been affected.
- 13:52 GMT
Cloudflare has reported that it has restored access to its secure internet traffic service for its London servers.
“We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover... We have re-enabled WARP access in London,” the company said on its status page.
