Cloudflare suffered a significant outage on 2025-11-18, causing widespread 500 internal server errors across its network. This incident disrupted several major online services including the social media platform X, OpenAI's ChatGPT, graphic design tool Canva, and the popular game League of Legends.
Widespread Service Impacts
The outage started around 6:00 am ET and affected Cloudflare's customers globally. Users experienced significant downtime, escalating concerns over the reliability of cloud-based infrastructures. Popular monitoring services like Downdetector were also impacted, making it harder to track and diagnose issues as they arose.
Investigative Efforts and Regional Variations
Cloudflare announced it was investigating the problems, mentioning planned maintenance at its Santiago (SCL) data center scheduled from 12:00 to 15:00 UTC. Despite these efforts, users in the US experienced prolonged disruptions, while some regions like the UK reported partial recovery over the same period.
Infrastructure Dependency Highlighted
This major outage shed light on the modern internet's dependency on central infrastructure providers like Cloudflare. The scale of the incident underscores potential vulnerabilities in the internet's resilience when critical nodes go offline. Continuous efforts to enhance infrastructure reliability are necessary to mitigate future risks.
